Star Wars: KOTOR: The Longest Road
by What Ithacas Mean
Summary: Darth Malak is dead. The Star Forge has been destroyed. The Jedi Civil War is over. But for Safine Dai, formerly Darth Revan, and Jedi Knight Bastila Shan, the struggle is far from done. Chapter 7: introducing a small complication.
1. Chapter 1

Preliminary notes and disclaimers.

SW: KOTOR has preyed on my mind for, quite literally, years. Recently I started to think more closely about the aftermath, and this is the result. It's a work in progress, of course, and updates will be irregular or interrupted as life requires. I've taken some liberties with canon - Revan will always be female to me, and other modifications forthcoming - but in general I'm trying to stay roughly within the scope of the material available on Wookiepedia.

Spoilers should be expected for a wide range of SW material. As we all know, Star Wars belongs to Lucasfilm etc. (Though yr. humble correspondant owes quite a debt to Timothy Zahn and Michael A. Stackpole for years of teenage entertainment, and did not actually see the films until a long time after book exposure.)

I'll do my best to update fortnightly as long as there's interest. (Interest should be registered in comments and criticism.)

* * *

#

**Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: The Longest Road**

_The Jedi Civil War is over._

_Feted as heroes, Safine Dai - formerly Darth Revan - and the crew of the Ebon Hawk return to Coruscant._

_In the month since the battle at the Star Forge, the crew has dispersed, leaving only Safine Dai and Bastila Shan behind._

_Both of them are under the close eye of the Jedi Council._

_But darker things are stirring, and they may yet be called to a duty neither of them could have imagined.  
_

**#**

**Chapter One**

**#**

Bastila Shan claws her way out of the nightmare like a drowning woman coming up from the deep, the stink of lightning choking her throat, black rage eating at her bones. Her sweat-soaked sheets tangle her feet like fetters, and in the dark quiet of her chamber it is whole minutes before she remembers where she is.

Not in a cell on Malak's flagship. Not on the Star Forge. Nor yet on the _Ebon Hawk, _which has come to feel more like a safe haven than a battered freighter has any right to feel.

Her quarters in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant should be a safe haven. _Should._

And the quiet presence waiting patiently in the chair across the room should be in chambers on the far side of the complex, and not here.

"I thought I locked my door," she says. Her tongue tastes like bile and screaming.

"You did." Safine Dai Revan shifts. The chair creaks under her weight. A rueful concern leavens her amusement. "But I have many skills. And sharing your nightmares isn't exactly a recipe for a good night's rest."

"If you mind them so much, you can always block me out." She's unable, quite, to keep the savage edge from her voice. Inhale. _There is no passion, there is serenity. I am a Jedi. I am Bastila Shan, and I _am still _a Jedi._ "Sorry," she says, more quietly, and thumbs the lights on low.

In the dim glow, the former Sith Lord at her bedroom table quirks a weary eyebrow and says nothing. The corners of her yellow-green eyes are tight with tiredness, and skin drawn taut over sharp cheekbones gives her features a pale, unhealthy cast. She looks much as she did aboard the _Hawk_, though it is a month since they made planetfall at Coruscant: a soldier's undress shirt tucked untidily into Corellian leathers, with her lightsaber clipped to the belt. No blaster in the temple, and no spare lightsaber, either: Dai has practised restraint and calm, even if it has not extended to wearing robes for anything other than formal occasions.

The Jedi Order has not chosen to reveal the fact that it is _Revan_, redeemed and reprogrammed, who is the Republic's latest hero. And Revan has chosen not to reveal to the Order that she knows she was not always a smuggler and Jedi prodigy by the name of Safine Dai. Bastila is not sure why she keeps Dai's secret: the others from the _Ebon Hawk _have said nothing out of loyalty, or in Jolee's case, a sense perhaps of deviltry. But she - her first loyalty, as long as she can remember, has always been to the Order. _Should _always have been to the Order.

Deep inside her, quiet and betrayed, she will always hear the voice Malak burned into her head. _They used you, Shan. _Used her, used their captive Revan, used the individual Safine Dai who could have been innocent, once.

The grief and affection in Dai's bond has been her only certainty since that moment on the Star Forge when she chose to live. To renounce, if she could, the Dark Side of the Force. That, and the sense that even in her worst nightmares, she isn't alone.

It might be easier if she were. Easier, at least, to believe that she doesn't deserve redemption - but Jedi Second Chance herself is convincing evidence to the contrary. She swings her feet over the side of her bed, gathers her sleeping robe around herself. _Logical consistency, Shan. Try to have some. _"Why are you here, Dai?"

"It was an excuse to sneak past the poor sods the Council has watching us both. They don't even know what they're watching us _for_, of course, so..." A shrug. But the lightness in Dai's tone is deliberate. Her glance is level, full of infinite compassion; full of dreadful knowledge. "And I thought... I thought you could use a friend."

"You're looking to trade Dark Side reminiscences now?" Bastila bites her tongue on angry sharpness. _There is no emotion. There is peace._ It's unjust, she knows, and a holdover from that long terrible week that any implication of weakness is sufficient to make her flinch and snap.

"No," Dai says. Her mouth does something painful and complicated. "But I have" - a hesitation - "some experience with bad dreams."

**#**

**#**

Dai pours Alderaanian whiskey from her dented, blaster-scorched hipflask. Amber liquid gurgles in the glass, swirls and settles.

"Drink," Dai says, and pushes the glass across the table's polished surface until it rests in front of Bastila's interlocked fingers. "It's good for you."

_Drink. It's good for you!_ A much less serious Safine Dai said that, in an Anchorhead cantina, gleeful and laughing and pushing drinks that smelled like alcoholic marsh water into the hands of the entire crew. Even Mission. Bastila had sniffed, said something about the dignity of the Order, and walked out into the cool desert night, then.

Not so now. It tastes like caramel and grain and heat, and stings the back of her throat like fire. The glass makes a _snick_ against the tabletop when she sets it down. The sleeve of her robe rides up her forearm. There is a shiny ring of scarring around her wrist: burn tissue, healed as much as it ever will. Malak left his marks, and few enough on the outside.

Dai refills her glass without speaking.

"I kill you," Bastila says. She stares at the whiskey. If she just stares at it, if she doesn't think, doesn't look up, maybe she can pretend it happens to someone else. "In my nightmares. I kill you, and Juhani, and Jolee, and Malak takes me as his apprentice and together we lay waste to the entire galaxy and we _revel_ in it."

"That's a bad one." Dai's tone is dispassionate, almost clinical. She swigs from her hipflask, sets it down. "Could be worse, though."

"How?"

"I remember dreaming something like that." A wry, pained smile. "But it wasn't a nightmare. There was no part of me that stood apart and watched in dread and woke sweating and panting and cold with the fear that it might be real."

"Master Vrook thinks it is a sign of how close I am still to the Dark Side." The words curdle on her tongue.

"Vrook. Bah." Dai snorts. "We're all close to the Dark Side, Bastila. A heartbeat. A choice. One choice after another. Vrook thinks that if you make one bad choice, or even two, you're forever tainted." She snaps her fingers, points the index one like a blaster. "Do you _want _to rule the galaxy? Or lay waste to it?"

"No!" And she doesn't. She really, really doesn't. She doesn't ever want to go to war again,

"But it doesn't change the fact that Malak got inside your head, huh? And you can't - quite - scrape him all the way out."

"That is," Bastila swallows, "an accurate assessment. How could you -?"

"Know?" The tight smile doesn't quite reach her yellow-green eyes. "Unfair advantage, remember? I can read your mind nearly as well as you can read mine. Or could. I wouldn't advise poking around in there these days, because it's all _kinds_ of confused."

"You're remembering?"

"More and more all the time." A rueful edge. "Mostly nightmares. Well. Things I _wish_ were nightmares." Dai sighs, props her elbows on the table. In the dim shadows she seems unutterably weary, and very, very old, and the control she exerts over her end of their bond wavers briefly. Bastila senses something that might have been the embers of an ancient rage, the traces of miserable self-loathing uncertainty, cold grieving regret -

_Trust me, Bastila, you don't want to see this tonight. _And Dai closes her out with an insistence no less firm for its gentleness.

It makes the dread and terror in her nightmares seem almost welcoming by comparison. _"I have some experience with bad dreams_," Bastila hears again, and thinks for a moment how alone Dai must be. Master Bindo is out on Dantooine, helping with the reconstruction; Carth is back with the fleet - Bastila received an awkward holo message from him just yesterday, hoping she was well and asking her in a roundabout way to keep an eye out for Dai - and before he left, he and Dai had combined forces to convince Mission to go to school, in a boarding establishment on Coruscant's moon, with Zaalbar there to keep an eye on her (it surprised Bastila to learn that now-Commodore Carth Onasi is actually quite well-off, and more so since the Senate voted the 'Star Forge heroes' a bursary in thanks), and Juhani left with mediation team for Bothawui a week ago now. And Canderous... well. The Mandalorian disappeared shortly after the victory celebrations. Bastila suspects Dai knows where he intended to go, but it doesn't change the fact that apart from the droids, the only person on the planet whom Dai is inclined to trust with _anything _to do with Revan is Bastila herself.

_I thought you could use a friend_, in that context, becomes something far more complicated.

"I'm sorry," Bastila offers after a minute. "I didn't realise - "

"Not your fault." Dai shakes her head, and her eyes are dark. "Don't apologise to me, Bastila. All the apologies between us should run the other way."

Bastila opens her mouth. Closes it again. She swallows. Quietly, she says, "I confess, I didn't expect you to ever say that."

"Just because I used to be a murdering bastard doesn't mean I can't own up to my mistakes." Dai's grin is brief and bitter. "Just - was Safine Dai ever real, Bastila? Was she a real person, or did the Council build the new me out of scraps and dreams and lies?"

_A tall handsome woman stood before the bacta tank, hands on her hips and a pained look in her eye. "All right, Zhar," she said, and her voice was resigned. "But after this, we're even, you got me? You give me a new ID and let me disappear, and don't even fracking _think_ about letting me remember this."_

Bastila shakes the memory away. She was younger then, and so certain the Council knew what it was doing. Now... "Master Zhar knew a woman," she says, quietly. "I wasn't very involved in the... process. Of reprogramming-" an ugly word, but nothing less than the truth "-you. But he said her history was very similar to yours, before you came to the Order the first time. I don't know much about her life, but she'd been a smuggler, and she - well. I gather she owed Master Zhar a debt, and she agreed to let her memories form the template for your new identity." She hesitates. "They changed your face, you know. Revan - you - wore a mask for a very long time, but the Council thought it best if you were different. It would have been awkward if you were easily recognised."

"An understatement if I ever heard one." Dai snorts, softly. "Thank you for telling me."

"There is little enough reason for me to keep it from you. Now, at least." Bastila sips Alderaanian whiskey, watching the way the liquid change colour in the light. It's stronger drink than she's used to, and a suspicion that the warm distance slipping between her and her emotions might not be the best possible thing nags at her. But it is such a pleasant relief to be able to relax. _Even if I succumb to the Dark Side, Dai is strong enough to stop me from hurting anyone. _She used to fear Revan. Used to fear Dai, because the other woman's strength was so much greater than her own that she knew if Dai ever turned on her she would be at the other woman's mercy. But now that same knowledge is a relief. It's almost bitterly funny. The first time she has felt safe in weeks is in the presence of a former Dark Lord of the Sith.

"'Former' being the important qualification." Dai picks up on her train of thought and gives her a wry look. "You underestimate yourself, Bastila. In a lot of the ways it counts, you're stronger than I think I ever was."

Bastila blinks at the unexpected compliment, absurdly warmed. Foolishness, of course, to be so relieved by Dai's respect, but she has felt less respect and more suspicious wariness among the masters and her peers since their return from the Star Forge than ever before in her life. That there is someone to whom she does not need to prove herself - not uncorrupted, but capable of _choosing again_, even if that someone is the infamous Revan, even if that, too, is dangerous.

The whiskey warms her throat. "Why did you ask?" she says, half without thinking.

The suddenly strained quality of Dai's stillness is a warning. Not an idle question, this, and a trickle of apprehension cuts through the warming whiskey. "Dai?" she says, soft inquiry, and catches the tired yellow-green gaze.

Dai blows out a breath on a one-shouldered shrug, and some of the tension leaves her frame. "I've been doing a lot of meditating." She rubs the cap of her hipflask with her thumb, looks aside. "Trying to remember - trying to _integrate_ what I'm remembering without losing what's left of my mind and what remains of my soul. It's all scraps and fragments and flashes - I can remember the smell of acantha flowers in the contemplation garden from when I was a Padawan, and how the shadows moved across their petals, and the voice of the ancient Jedi master who used to sit in the corner and hum, but I can't remember her _name_. And sometimes I'm not even sure if I'm remembering something Revan knew or something Safine forgot. Although some of the memories are rather _unmistakably _Revan, if you know what I mean. I was a right nasty bugger there for a while, as the galaxy at large _still_ knows better than I do." Her mouth twists. "And last night I remembered a name, Bastila. A name that terrifies me, that even frightened the me I remember being as _Darth _Revan, and I _don't know why._"

Bastila goes cold. "What name?"

"Dromund Kaas." Intent, frustrated, Dai looks at her as though she should recognise the words.

But she doesn't.

"Bugger." Dai scrapes a hand back through her tousled dark hair, weary. "I hoped you'd know what it meant. I didn't want to go poking in the Archives myself: it's bad enough being half Safine Dai, half Revan, without the Council discovering I've remembered a bunch of things and deciding that means I need _another_ set of new memories."

"Is it a person? A planet?"

"If I knew, I'd tell you." Dai sighs. "All I have is the name and cold dread. Which is just a little worrying, don't you think? I was Darth _bloody _Revan. I crushed _worlds_. And it frightened me?"

Bastila swallows. If she didn't know the self-loathing _I was Darth bloody Revan_ hid, she might find Dai's apparently easy acceptance of her past disturbing. But she knows Safine Dai's accommodation with her memories is nothing near as simple as she makes it sound. Which makes _Dromund Kaas_ even more troubling. "I'll look in the Archives for you."

"I didn't like to ask." Dai taps her hipflask, staring into the distance, then shakes her head with a quick grin. "I can do it myself. But I admit, I'd be grateful if you did."

"It should give me something useful to do." Bastila exhales. "I confess, I can't escape feeling as though as I have too much time to think, and too few duties, since our return."

"You, too?" A wry glance. "Not much useful to do around here, is there? Do you remember on Tatooine, when that administrator said to Carth -?"

The reminiscence is a distraction from nightmares and other dreads, and Bastila lets herself fall into it willingly. Dai seems to sense that she doesn't want to be left alone - or perhaps Dai, too, is unwilling tonight to be alone with bad dreams and private dreads - and so one reminiscence turns into another turns into a game of dejarik and Dai laughingly retreating her game pieces as the sun comes up.


	2. Chapter 2

Notes and disclaimers.

Spoilers should be expected for a wide range of SW material. As we all know, Star Wars belongs to Lucasfilm etc. (Though yr. humble correspondant owes quite a debt to Timothy Zahn and Michael A. Stackpole for years of teenage entertainment, and did not actually see the films until a long time after book exposure.)

I'll do my best to update fortnightly as long as there's interest. (Interest should be registered in comments and criticism.)

* * *

#

**Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: The Longest Road**

_The Jedi Civil War is over._

_Feted as heroes, Safine Dai - formerly Darth Revan - and the crew of the Ebon Hawk return to Coruscant._

_In the month since the battle at the Star Forge, the crew has dispersed, leaving only Safine Dai and Bastila Shan behind._

_Both of them are under the close eye of the Jedi Council._

_But darker things are stirring, and they may yet be called to a duty neither of them could have imagined.  
_

**#**

**#**

**Chapter Two**

**#**

Safine Dai knows she's dreaming. Coruscant has no beaches like this, long and silver beside a green ammonia-scented sea. The sky above is lavender, the corona of a gaseous moon flaring purple in the glare of the distant sun.

Malak sits on the sand, feet half in the waves, robes wet to the knee. His bald head gleams, but his jaw is whole, beardless, and his eyes are young enough to break her heart. "Why'd you kill me, Rev?" he asks in thin unbroken voice of early adolescence, a voice that pierces her like a brother's. Or a son's. "_Why'd you kill me?_"

She can't remember if she wants to cry because they were young once, and innocent, and she broke them; or if because even after everything she cared for him still. It is _her fault_ he hated her, and he died at her hands and she lives yet.

His hand recedes from her grasp, too far: she's reached for him too late, and even as his mouth says, "_Why'd you kill me?_" his face has changed, blackened, split and the scarred burnt horror inside his robes rasps, "_Why did you kill us, Revan?_" and her guts lurch because even ruined and mutilated she knows this face, too.

Knows it, and remembers what she did to Nawar A'kar, a Bothan and a Jedi Knight who would not break and would not turn and once, long ago, was her closest friend.

"_Why did you kill us, Revan?_" they rasp together, and the sky reddens and the hacking smoke of Dxun's burning jungles chokes her throat. Malak/A'kar stands at the head of a host in the grey crackling haze and her lightsaber is alive in her hands and stuck to her palm and she cannot throw it away. "_Why did you kill us?_" and she cannot even open her mouth to answer. Her tongue is dry, dead, and she is dying, crumbling away from the inside, hollow. "_Are you awake?_" the dead rumble. "_Are you awake?_"

_What the -?_ And Safine slides out of the dream into sweaty stiff wakefulness and the knowledge she's not alone in her room. "Bugger," she mutters, and curls her hand around the lightsaber under her pillow as she opens sticky eyes.

The kid had enough sense to wait by the door, one hand resting lightly on T3-M4's flat head as if for reassurance. "Jedi Dai?" he says, worriedly. "Are you awake?"

"I am now." She frowns, squints, and finally matches his face to the vague familiarity of his sense in the Force. He's a human kid, about fourteen, all knees and elbows. "Matt, right? Vandar's Padawan? What the hell are you doing here, kid, and how'd you get in?"

"Your little guy here let me in." He gives her wide, nervous eyes. "Master Vandar sent me to find you. You're helping train the younger students with him today? In lightsaber techniques?"

_I am? But that is to be in the afternoon, and -_

_It's already afternoon, idiot._ The dream has made her sluggish, or she would have realised already the Temple _feels _like afternoon, a warm murmur of alert energy in the Force. I'm too old to stay awake all night anymore, damnit. Safine is aware of Bastila through the bond, a trickle of focus and dry frustrated interest that's been at work for hours already.

"Thirty-two isn't old," she says out loud, and pretends not to see the kid hide a grin as she rolls out of her bed. She's managed to shed the habit of sleeping in armour (that came in useful on Korriban, but like HK-47, is something she's had to leave on the Ebon Hawk in the attempt not to acquire more notoriety than the double-helping she has already) but not of sleeping fully clothed, and the habits of a lifetime - two lifetimes, if she's being accurate with herself - suffice to enable her to shake off the dream and push through sluggish to alert without needing to draw strength from the Force.

T3 warbles a question at her while she's shrugging her robe over her head - it's rough wool, scratchy, and smells like must and storage, but you have to show a good example for the kids, and it'll hide the wrinkles in her shirt - "Yeah, I'll want my spare, Tee. Good idea."

"Spare?" Matt's not easily fazed by the apparent disarray of just-woken Jedi. He's watching her with bright-eyed curiosity and a kind of bouncing eagerness.

"Lightsaber." Said weapon being extended from a compartment in T3's torso by the little droid's manipulator arm. Safine takes it, chill plasmould grip cool against her palm, clips it on her belt beside its twin, and doesn't meet Matt's grin with one of her own. Too young, blast him. "Lead on, Padawan," she says, wryly formal to cover the bitter bleed of remembered pain, and follows him out into the hall, T3's wheels squeaking on the tiles as the droid trails behind them.

The war has left the Temple's corridors naked and empty. It is a complex meant to hum with life, but apart from the vegetation that lines the public halls and the brighter private ones - carefully droid-tended shrubbery from half a hundred worlds, blue and green and yellow with purple edgings and colours in the infrared and ultraviolet she can't even see - there are only a few dozen living beings over the age of eighteen in residence. Matt nods politely to an elderly Caamasi Jedi Knight whose name she doesn't know, and a Verpine Master herds a gaggle of very young younglings down a hallway as they pass. The walls keep out Coruscant's constant noise and rush. The only sound is their footsteps, T3's whirring wheels, and the plash and gurgle of the occasional water feature.

It's enough to set her teeth on edge. Quiet, too often, in both sets of her memories, means ambush. But she keeps the suspicious part of her locked down tight: no need to broadcast her unease to the too-young kid in front of her.

And hell, Dai. Mission's only a little older, and she spent the last few months fighting Sith like the rest of you. So get a grip.

Vandar awaits them in one of the smaller training halls, hands folded in the sleeves of his robes, watching with deceptive placidity while a class of twelve students meditate crosslegged on the floor in front of him. The students are all Matt's age or a year or two younger. Or the equivalent for their respective species: she counts six humans, a Duros, a Bothan, a Twi'lek, a Mon Cal, an avian Rishii sitting with hunched wings, and a Bith. Seven humans, when Matt slips past to take his place in line.

"Late, you are," Vandar observes without turning. His green ears tuft disapprovingly. "Old, I am. For chasing students and teaching combat, too old."

Safine bits her tongue. The diminutive green ancient could probably kick her ass from here to Tatooine, from what Bastila said and what little she remembers, which makes courtesy the better part of valour. "I overslept," she says, mildly. "Forgive me."

"Slept? Bah! If like this you sleep, you saved the galaxy how?"

"Well, since I don't remember much sleeping at the time -" The students are paying surreptitious attention, despite Vandar's beady eye. "-I suppose you could say I've been catching up."

"Hah!" But his ears are twitching with amusement now. "All yours, these rascals are. Watching, I will be." He cranes his head, finally, and bestows upon her a crooked, leathery smile. "My Padawan I want back in one piece."

Safine bows fractionally, and waits for him to retreat to a stool in the corner before she turns to the children. She's never done this before. Not that she remembers, anyway. These are the students who should be Padawans already, the ones whose Masters the war has killed, or who thought the galaxy too dangerous to take an apprentice out into it. They've been drilled in the basic lightsaber styles with toy weapons for years, and none of them would be here if Vandar hadn't judged them ready to build their own weapons.

And he wants her to give them their first lesson.

It's either a vote of confidence or another bloody test, and looking at those earnest waiting faces -

_No games. Do it as best you know how, and maybe when it counts, it'll keep some of these bloody children alive._

"On your feet," she says, the snap of command in her voice. A cold, familiar feeling descends on her as they scramble upright. Her shoulders square of their own accord. Her chin comes up, and the robes seem less like tawdry props and more like armour. _Hello, Revan, _she greets the ghost that lives inside her skin, and feels a grim amused recognition in return.

"Matt." He's the one whose name she knows, so when she unclips the first of her sabers from her belt it's him she tosses it to. He catches it right-handed and gives her a questioning look, his fringe flopping over his forehead. "What's that in your hand, Matt?"

He looks down at it, looks back at her. "A lightsaber?" His tone suggests he suspects a trick and is deeply unimpressed by it.

The Duros boy sniggers.

Behind the line of students, a transparisteel window looks out onto an enclosed contemplation garden. Safine clasps her hands in the small of her back. "So it's a lightsaber. What's it for? You" - to the Duros - "What's your name?"

"Devin," the Duros mutters.

"What is a lightsaber _for_, Devin?"

He flushes to the base of his skull. "Defending yourself?"

"Is that all?" Her glance sweeps their line. "Any other answers?"

"Defending other people?" the Bothan offers timidly.

Safine raises her eyebrows and waits. The Rishii fidgets. The Mon Calamari blinks once, slowly. No one else speaks. The silence stretches.

"Defence is a good answer." Her smile is thin. "Unfortunately, it's the wrong answer. This -" she ignites her spare lightsaber with a snap-hiss and they flinch in the sudden orange glow " - isn't a light_shield_. It's a weapon. And the primary purpose of a weapon is _killing people_."

_And we know about that, don't we, Revan?_

"When you carry a weapon, you're stating your willingness to use it. When you pull a weapon, you're stating your _intent _to to use it. The only difference between a lightsaber and a blaster in this regard is that with a lightsaber, you're usually close enough to look the person you intend to kill in the eye while you're doing it. Lightsabers don't have a stun setting. So from the moment you draw your weapon, you have to be fully committed to using it. Any hesitation in a real fight runs the risk of getting you, and anyone who is relying on you, killed." She inhales. They're listening. Good. "We're Jedi. More often than we'd like, we end up dying in the defence of the people of the Republic or in defence of innocents at large, especially in disturbed times like these. It's one of the responsibilities that go along with our gifts. But it is no one's duty to die because someone was scared and stupid and reacted without thinking - and yes, you'll be scared. With any luck, you'll never be so scared you piss your pants - but that happens. Believe me when I tell you it happens."

"But -" Matt says, hesitantly, fingering the grip of the saber in his hand. "Isn't fear - I mean -?"

"The path to the Dark Side?" She snorts, ignoring Vandar's silent watching form, and deactivates her lightsaber. "Kid, I'd rather have you afraid and alive than overconfident and dead. Fear's a useful tool for keeping you cautious and alert, as long as you don't let it override your better judgement."

"So..." The Bothan girl's fur ripples, and she raises her hand. "When you fought Darth Malak, you were scared?"

_When was the last time you were afraid, Dai? You haven't been afraid of dying since even before the _Leviathan. Malak... Malak hadn't been frightening, except inasmuch as he showed her the cost of her choices. He hated her, and even with the power of the Star Forge behind him, he feared her. From the moment they crossed lightsabers, it was only a matter of time before his hatred and rage led him to make a mortal error.

Facing Carth after the _Leviathan _was much more daunting. Facing Bastila, with the fire of the Dark Side in her eyes and the agony of lonely betrayal echoing in their bond...

These children do not need to know that. With luck, these children will never need to know that. Though Safine knows better than to expect that they will be that lucky. Between her deeds and Malak's and the natural lure of power, there are still plenty of fallen Jedi on the edges of the Republic. And the Republic fleet will be mopping up elements of the Sith battlefleet for years to come, even if no new leader emerges to catalyse a general resistance. There is plenty of scope for tragedies grand and petty, and judging by past experience, Jedi will be at the heart of many. And no doubt responsible for many more.

"It was my responsibilty." Her voice is blunt, flat. "Malak could not be allowed to continue. My fear could not be permitted to interfere with my duty. But yes. I was afraid." She considers for a brief second, then gives the Bothan kid half a grin. "And my job today is to help you to be prepared to do your duty, should you ever need to draw a saber in earnest. Here." She tosses the girl her second lightsaber. "You and Matt there. Attack me."

They trade dubious looks.

"I said," Safine repeats, patiently, "Attack me. This is supposed to be an opportunity for you to learn."

She relaxes into the Force as the lightsabers ignite with the familiar snap-hiss, orange and pale white-ish green. The two kids are unsure of their weapons and themselves, uncommitted. The Bothan has slightly better focus, Matt a little more confidence, and her awareness expands as the other students shuffle back into a rough semicircle. _And it's just like training with Bastila and Juhani, Dai. Just remember to hold back._

_Breathe. Wait. And - Now._

Safine steps inside the arc of Matt's slash, grabs his lightsaber wrist with one hand and slaps his neck lightly with the other. "You're dead," she says pleasantly to his shocked expression. She reaches out to the Force to harden the air behind her back to slow the Bothan girl's strike, and pivots. Her snapkick takes the lightsaber out of the girl's hand, and she seizes it with the Force and has it pointed at the kid's face before the girl even begins to react.

Matt's pulse beats hard under her hand. The Bothan's breathing is loud in the silence. "Two mistakes, children," she says, quietly. "You didn't work as a team. And you didn't take me seriously because I was unarmed and you didn't want to _hurt _me. You didn't _commit_."

She releases Matt's arm and steps back to sweep the other students with a glance. "For a Jedi," and her voice is very soft, "restraint is not only laudable, but necessary. But in a fight where it is not merely your own life at stake, but the lives of others, if you hold back you will fail in your duty. This is the fundamental paradox at the heart of the order. Jedi exist to defend and preserve life, even at the cost of our own. But to defend life, sometimes we have to take life. If you can't commit to that decision, then no matter how good your skills are with a weapon, you're a far greater danger to yourself and the people who rely on you than you are to your opponent."

The kids are silent. The lightsabers hum. Safine bites her lip and carefully does not look at Vandar. _Do it like it counts. Do it like it matters, Dai. Because it might._ "These are the only things I can teach you. They're lessons I learned the hard way, in places no decent Jedi should care to be." She doesn't flinch from Revan's ghost. Too much of what she knows is Revan's, it feels, sometimes. And she's not sure how she'll ever make her peace with that. "Train like it's the real thing because one day it will be. Defend what you can for as long as you can. And if you have to die, do it on your feet."

She reclaims both lightsabers, inclines her head to the students, and leaves the room. 


	3. Chapter 3

_See previous disclaimers._

_And now, for some long-awaited explosions._

* * *

**Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: The Longest Road**

**#**  
**Chapter Three**  
**#**

The Archives have always been one of Bastila's favourite places in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. As a child, before her training took her to the Enclave on Dantooine, its ageless silence fascinated her: the climate-controlled rooms filled with _paper_ and plasfilm, records concerning Jedi from hundreds of worlds and tens of hundreds of years, datapads and holotanks and every living record the Order ever acquired.

Now, it feels like a link to a more stable past.

Her morning has been spent in the Republic Intelligence Services' offices near the Senate, where hard-eyed officers and uncomfortable civilian agents try unsuccessfully to hide their resentment of the Jedi occasionally assigned to help question high status Sith prisoners-of-war. This week she is one of those Jedi, and she's managed to hide her discomfort and gnawing insecurity. It is too easy to see the men and women who have followed Revan and Malak only as _the enemy_. Nearly as easy as it is to see how easily she might have convinced them to follow _her._

But it's something to do, a duty worth doing. The Masters won't let her return to the front lines until they are reasonably certain she is not at risk of falling. And even if she wanted to go back to the Fleet, she isn't sure she should. And it is a distraction from the thoughts that roll around and around in her head, _if only_ and _what if_ and a thousand other things that fill her with creeping dread or terrified rage.

The Nomi Sunrider Reading Room is panelled with Fijisi wood from Cardooine. Sunlight lances through the transparisteel dome overhead. Bastila pauses just inside the door, and almost smiles. Safine Dai has a knack for knowing what people need. _Dromund Kaas_ is something to focus on. And Bastila needs purpose now, more than just _being Jedi_. She's too used to _doing _to be at ease waiting when there a danger to the Republic still exists.

_Master Vrook is right. I _am _impatient._

"Bastila!"

The archivist is a stooped, aged Twi'lek with half of one lekku missing, a battered metal prosthetic in place of her left arm and a tall Antarian fighting stick for a crutch. She stumps across the space between the study carrels, her face alight in greeting.

"Tia Cormyra?" An old friend, and one Bastila has thought dead these many months. The shock of joy roots her to her spot. "But - how? I thought your ship went down in the battle over Toprawa -"

"And so it did, dear." Cormyra stops in front of her, reaches out to touch her cheek with her flesh hand, and Bastila feels her, a white-gold warmth in the Force, speckled with concern. The elderly Jedi Knight's voice is light, rueful. "The Force was with me. I crashlanded alive, but I had a spot of bother getting off-planet again for a few months because of the Sith presence. That's where I picked up this limp. At my time of life! I'm too old to be leaving my research and getting into scrapes. But _you_! I hear you've achieved quite a bit, you and that handsome young woman Vandar and Dorak shanghaied into the Order."

Bastila shrugs, uncomfortable. "Not without help."

Cormyra clucks her tongue. Her glance is all compassion. "And not without cost, either? No need to say anything, dear. I'm old enough to have seen my share of bad spots. It's little comfort to you now, but one learns to live with it eventually. I promise you that."

"Dai said much the same thing." And she's been - she must admit it - a little uneasy taking a former fallen Jedi's word on the matter. Even if it's Dai's. But Cormyra radiates peace and stillness and compassion, and has for as long as Bastila has known her. Not a fighter, except at great need, and not very strong in the Force: Tia Cormyra is no Vrook Lamar or Vandar Tokare. But she is kind, and determined, and when called upon willing to leave the historical research that has been her life's work for more years than Bastila has been alive in service of the greater good.

"A sensible young woman," Cormyra notes, approving. "We need more sensible Jedi. You youngsters are either too serious or too excitable these days." A flicker of grief in the Force. "Well, I suppose it comes with the times. But what brings you to the Archives, dear? You can't have come to visit me, not if you didn't know I was here."

"It's good to know you're alive." Bastila inhales. She's lost too many friends - too many _good_ friends - to the blasted war. Objectively, she knows, a Jedi is not supposed to value one life more than another. In practice it doesn't work that way, no matter how she tries. To find Tia Cormyra living unknots a tight grieving abscess inside her she didn't even know was there. "But no. I came because I need to investigate something in our records."

"What? You know I'll help if I can."

"I need to find out about something - or someone - called Dromund Kaas. A basic records search didn't bring anything up, so I came here."

Cormyra frowns. "You know, that almost sounds familiar." She pats Bastila's arm, a distant, thoughtful cast to her blue features. "Where did you hear the name?"

"In a roundabout way..." Bastila hesitates. Well, she'll keep Dai's secrets if she can. _But the fact that it was something _Revan _feared might be important_. "In a roundabout way, from Darth Revan." _Please don't ask me for details, Tia._

"Ah." The elderly Twi'lek gives her a long, searching look. "Zhar tells me you were in Malak's hands for a bit." She squeezes Bastila's arm. "Don't worry, dear. I won't ask you anything you don't want to tell. But if you need to talk, I'm here."

"Thank you," Bastila says, obscurely guilty.

"All part of the service. Now. Dromund Kaas. Revan. Sith." Cormyra raps the floor lightly with her Antarian crutch. The Jedi Knight does not run the collections or maintain the catalogue. Those duties are performed by droids. But Tia Cormyra was a sort of unofficial archivist long before the Council made the Archives her official responsibility, or so Bastila heard as a child, due to her capacious memory and a positive _gift _for finding just the right record from a host of similar ones. The Great Library on Ossus tried to recruit her, but Cormyra prefers Coruscant, and likely always will.

Tia Cormyra is not a perfect Jedi. She has a passion for _details_.

"You're in luck," Cormyra says slowly, after a few minutes. "I think I came across a mention, shortly before the Council saw fit to dig me out and send me off to Toprawa. I was - what was I reading? Oh, yes. Records and memoires from Jedi investigating abuse of power on Sluis Van between a hundred fifty and a hundred years ago, or thereabouts - very interesting period in the Sluis sector, you know, and shamefully understudied, but I'm sure you're not interested in economic history. I think it was in Jorin Kess's reports, but it could have been in Semla's autobiography." She sniffs. "That girl! She couldn't write great literature, but a useful documentary source - ah, well. Try Stack Fifty-Three A if you want the hardcopy. We lost the electronic records thirty years ago when some young fool of a slicer thought it would be _funny_ to pull a prank and alter them all to read _Coruscant sucks mynock balls_ in forty different languages."

Hardcopy means hours sitting at a study carrel while her back stiffens and her neck starts to ache. Bastila represses a sigh. _The Force goes out of its way to teach me patience._ But at least it's a place to start: she could spend weeks looking on her own. "I'm grateful, Tia."

"It's my job, dear." Cormyra pats her arm again, affectionately. "Now, you make sure you come back and talk to me after you find what you're looking for, you hear me? It's been far too long since we had a proper chat." 

**#**

**#**

Safine is in one of the contemplation gardens, moving slowly through the forms of barehanded combat, when she feels Vandar approach. He's a still pool in the Force, all but unreadable. Matt, behind him, is jagged flares and nervous energy. T3, stationed by the door, beeps a greeting. She doesn't turn.

"Achieved much, have you, hmmm?"

Safine finishes her form. Sweat trickles down her back under her shirt: she's left her robes in T3's care. It feels real, the burn in her muscles, like the gravel underfoot, a clean exertion that puts no one else at risk. Not like the dangerous ghosts in her head, and the memories. "They're not ready," she says, and knows it's not really an answer to his question.

"Never ready, they will be, if teach them we do not."

She snorts. "I can show them how best to stay alive in a fight - by the dark gods of Dan and Korriban's hungry ghosts, any competent drill sergeant in the galaxy do that! But I can't teach them how to kill with compassion in their hearts. I can't teach them how to walk right on the line between _defence_ and _justifiable murder._ And I sure as hell can't show them how to deal with making bad calls between a choice of evils. You put me in a position to teach your shiny baby Jedi, Vandar, and I'll get their bright idealism all scuffed and broken."

Vandar is silent for a moment. Then: "What if _needful_, that is?"

She turns. He is watching her very levelly, a still calm pool of focussed attention, his labile ears tufted and waiting. _Never thought I'd hear you say that, you stubborn green ancient._ She raises her eyebrows. "Needful?"

"Saved not the Jedi who followed Revan, idealism." And there's a pointed statement, but Vandar only shrugs. "Fell, they did, and why? Powerful, the Dark Side is. To serve an idea, we taught them. Perhaps more complicated, reality is. Perhaps of temptation, of bad choices, they should know."

"That's not something I'd've expected you to say."

"Too old to learn new tricks, I am not." Vandar's wrinkled smile is full of sorrow. "Dantooine..." He sighes. "Too much of hard choices we all learned, when Malak came. So. Teach the young ones, you will. Teach them to _commit_, as you say. Teach them what it means to make bad choices and live with them."

_This is what you wanted, right? When you walked out of that training room, you wanted to teach them more than lightsaber tricks._ But that's an old, old temptation. And if she teaches the children, sooner or later she'll show them the heart of the dark. Sooner or later, she'll show them why Jedi cannot go to war. Not and stay _Jedi._

She fingers the grip of her lightsaber, uneasy, and her grin is crooked. "I might not be the best person for that, Master Vandar."

"If I find a better, tell you I will." Evenly: "A request, this is not. As long as in the temple you are, teach them you will."

_Well, that's me told. Fall in, soldier_. _We'll get out from under these beady eyes eventually._ "I'll do what I can," she starts to say, and then Bastila wrenches her end of the bond wide open in fear and desperation and _need._

_What -?_

_Under attack. _Bastila, grim, the words punched like steel ball-bearings. _In the Archives. Droids. Numbers unknown. At least one Sith. Coms jammed. Need help._

Temple is a target-rich environment. Aloud, she says, "Where's the nearest shielded com?" _I'll be with you as soon as I can. Hang in there_.

"Outside the door." Matt, his worried expression matching Vandar's, for all the difference in their features.

She's at it almost before he's finished speaking and punches up the emergency protocol. "Sith infiltration," she says as alarms begin to blare. _Calm, Dai. _The complex is studded with shielded com stations and multiple redundancies, a holdover from some paranoid security planner during the war with Exar Kun. _And thank the Force for you, whoever you were._ "We have a Sith infiltration in progress, confirmed droids and Dark Jedi, other assets unknown. Recommend security scramble."

Somewhere in the temple are a set of security offices, each staffed with a tactical response team. The brainchild of the same paranoid security planner, and updated during the Civil War. Unless the Sith have managed to cut the secure lines, her message will have gotten through.

_Have to go, Dai. The situation has become somewhat pressing. _Safine feels Bastila's effort and a slice of pain through the bond, and then Bastila closes down into a resolute knot of desperate focus.

Safine doesn't wait for an acknowledgement from the security office. She runs.

**#**

**#**

Bastila Shan will never make an archivist. But she has the Force to guide her, and perhaps a little bit of luck, because it only takes her an hour, and not the week she feared, to find the reports of Jorin Kess, Chandrilan Jedi Knight and Senate-appointed investigator on Sluis Van between fifty-two and fifty years before the Great Sith War. She sets up at a study carrel beside Stack Fifty-Three, and doggedly starts sifting through two years of criminal investigation.

They make for dry reading: Kess was as much forensic accountant as Jedi, and his inquiries into the private empire-building of the Sluissi high families were methodical and slow. Bastila skims digests of figures, economic and political briefings, hastily-written interview reports...

Her neck is just beginning to hurt when she hits a more promising folder. Kess's personal notes.

The Force is with her. There, on the fifth page: _The Arkanian Veda claims Sith influence is involved in Minister Brill's rise to power. I hardly_ _think it likely in this day and age, but she says there is a man, a pilot out of the Unknown Regions, who can substantiate her claim._

She snorts at Kess's easy dismissal of the Sith. This day and age, indeed. Fortunate man. But she skims ahead. Several pages later: _Veda's pilot is a drunk and a fraud. He says he's from some Unknown Region planet called Dromund Kaas, says that it's home to a whole lot of Sith. An empire, would you believe? I can hardly believe I listened to Veda. I really can't see this Frell Cade and his battered freighter Luck as a means any self-respecting Sith would use to travel from the Unknown Regions - it barely looks like it could survive a Coruscant milk-run. And I have no sense of the Dark Side from him, either. No, this is plain old political corruption_. _Scratch 'lightsaber duel with dark adept' off the list of things I can look forward to._

Bastila pushes her straggling hair back off her forehead. So Kess had a sense of humour after all. And Dromund Kaas is real, outside of Dai's nightmares.

_Bugger_, as the former Sith lord might say.

That's when she feels it. A tickle in the Force. A little nagging warning, something not right. Something gone wrong.

She eases out of her seat. Stack Fifty-Three is in an annex off the reading rooms and the Archives proper, a narrow room whose shelves are filled with folders and holocrons. She's alone in here. There shouldn't be anyone other than Tia Cormyra and two or three visiting scholars in the whole wing. _It's just nerves, Bastila. You're jumpy because Dai's onto something with this Dromund Kaas thing._

But that's not it. No. It feels like the krayt dragon cave on Tatooine, the false safety of victory about to be punctured by ambush.

"Wonderful," she murmurs, and, lightsaber in hand, triggers the lockplate of the door.

Nothing. No whine of blasterfire, no red splash charring the wall by her head. The corridor is empty.

It _still_ feels wrong.

Cautiously, her saber held along her thigh and unlit - if this is paranoia at work, and not the promptings of the Force, it won't be easy to live down - she edges down the cream-tiled hall towards the reading rooms. The door is open, Coruscanti sunlight spilling from the dome into her dimmer corridor, and Bastila closes her eyes and braces her back against the wall and stretches out to the Force. If she can just narrow down this illusive sense of _threat_ -

Inhale. Exhale. Enhance the senses. Feel the world, the smell of polished wood and old paper, the soft whisper of Tia Cormyra's robes as she stacks datacards in the far corner of the reading room, the warm updraft of the aircurrents in the sunlight beneath the dome -

And like the shock of blue lightning, the sense of threat sharpens into a hard knife of certainty. _The dome._

No killsquad in their right mind would blow the dome. They don't need to. A shaped charge - _or a lightsaber_ - will take out a tiny section and then they will drop, repulsorbelts silent until the last instant before impact. Like black-armoured feathers, or a killing rain.

She sees it in her mind the instant before it happens, a swirl of possibilities all coalescing into one certain happening _now, _and suddenly there's no more _time._

The charges blow, a deceptively soft splintering _crump. _They're down and inside the bright room before Bastila is through the doorway with her lightsaber alive in her hands. Six droids and two men, matt black and armoured, blasters already tracking like the professionals they are. Bastila flicks her saber up barely in time to deflect the first whining bolts and ducks left to put her back to Tia's corner. One of the men is a Force adept, a dark one, a knotted maelstrom of shadow behind the visor of his helmet, and cold fear runs down Bastila's spine.

There's the snap-hiss of another lightsaber, and Tia says calmly from behind her, "I think we might be in a spot of bother, dear."

"Really?" Bastila grits between clenched teeth. The droids know their business; they're pulling a flanking maneuver to let them pour fire at her from three angles and she's _good _but using deflected blasterfire as an offensive weapon has never been her best skill and the dark adept is standing there with his hands folded _watching_ and if this lot has come in through the library who's to say there aren't other teams elsewhere? "You have a com there?"

"I tried mine, but it's jammed, dear." As a blaster bolt burns a crease along Bastila's hip, Cormyra moves up to cover her off side, lightsaber flaring silver-blue with each deflected bolt. "Professionals, I believe. Shall we attack?"

"Why not?" Bastila says, and wrenches the link between her and Revan open. "On my mark. I'll take out the two between us and the door. Cover my back."

_Under attack_, she tells Dai.

"Understood," Cormyra says.

_In the Archives. Droids. Numbers unknown. At least one Sith. Coms jammed. Need help. _"Go!" Bastila says, and vaults the study carrels to her left. Wood splinters under her hand. Her leap and roll takes her ten metres under the angle of the droid pair's blasters faster than they can adjust their aim. _I have you now, you bloody tin cans_.

_I'll be with you as soon as I can_, Dai says through the bond and Bastila sweeps her lightsaber up and into the first droid's torso.

It should've cut through metal armour as though it was hot wax. It doesn't. Instead, her lightsaber makes a fizzing noise and goes out.

_Cortosis. How bloody wonderful._

The blaster bolt that hammers her right shoulder is equally wonderful. She's still moving, which is the only thing that saves her, and Jedi pain management techniques shunt the blistered agony away before it can slow her down. She stabs her thumb at the on-off activation switch on her lightsaber - _Come on, damn you_ - and leaps backwards to put her back to Cormyra's once more. _Have to go, Dai. The situation has become somewhat pressing_. Her relit saber only just intersects a spatter of bolts that would have cut her in half.

She thinks the dark adept is laughing at them.


	4. Chapter 4

**Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: The Longest Road**

**#**  
**Chapter Four**  
**#**

This is Safine Dai Revan.

This is how she fights.

She drops down the turbolift shaft like a dart, counting off seconds in her head. _One. _Stepping out into space. _Two. _The air of her passage whistling past her head. _Three._

Seven seconds to drop thirty levels. At _five_ the turbolift doors on the Archive level begin to open: T3 is a very dependable slicer. _Six_. She tucks her knees to her chest.

_Seven._

The Force is a tide flowing through her and into her and over her. She is the tide and the tide is her and the Force is the lever about which the universe turns. She kicks out.

Her feet hit the shaft wall with bone-jarring force. Her plummet becomes a forward roll, gravity and acceleration harnessed to a lever moved by her will. The Force propels her through the turbolift doors into battle.

This is Safine Dai. This is how she _lives_.

Absolute commitment. No margin for error.

Six black-armoured blaster-armed droids. Hunter-killer types. Two Jedi, pressed hard and cornered: no one can deflect blasterfire forever. Sunlight glancing through a hole in the dome and the scent of scorched wood and desperation.

In fifteen years of war the woman who was once Revan has stepped onto more killing fields than any human has a right to survive. She has been beaten only once, and that once through treachery. Compared to fighting _Mando'ade_, this?

This is child's play.

Her feet take the first droid in the back of its chassis with the crunch of shattering circuitry. Bastila shouts _"Cortosis!"_ and Safine converts her lightsaber slash into a kick that bends the second droid's arm back towards its head before it can shoot her in the face. She drops, Force-yanks its blaster into her hand, and puts three shots at point-blank range - armour's no use that close - into the first droid's central processor before spinning to slot number two right in the optics.

Four droids. Three Jedi. Now _these_ are better odds.

Bastila claims one of the fallen droids' blasters. After that it ends quickly.

"Rescuing you's getting to be a habit," Safine says as she puts a final shot into Number Six's processor just to be sure. Bastila's shoulder's a burned mess, one that Safine winces to look at, and her elderly Twi'lek friend has blaster scoring on her left thigh. "You're going to need to get that seen to, you know."

"It'll keep." Bastila's expression is grim. "There's still at least one dark adept and his friend somewhere in the Temple."

The Twi'lek twitches her intact lekku in agreement. "As soon as he was certain the droids had us pinned down, he took off." Safine finds herself the recipient of a disturbingly clear stare. "Your arrival was timely, young woman. He does not yet have too much of a lead on us."

"Then I guess the question is what did he come for? If we can figure that out, we can get ahead of him." Bastila frowns.

"More like who's he here to kill." Safine jerks her chin at the smoking sparking dead droids. "These are hunter-killer models, Bastila. Optimised for fighting Jedi. You don't bring that kind of hardware on a picnic. Create panic and confusion, bring your target down while everyone's still wondering what the hell's going on, and exfil quick and quiet." Both Bastila and the Twi'lek are staring at her. _Right. Jedi aren't supposed to know Sith assassination SOP. Well, bugger that. You can't beat an enemy if you don't know how they think. _"Which way did he go?" 

#

#

_Not much of lead_ turns out to be _just enough_.

Two Knights have quarters in the Archive wing. The Twi'lek - Tia Cormyra - knows them both. One is Ilo Voon, a Jedi who served with the Republic Fleet and led the second assault on Iridonia at the height of the Sith offensive. The other is Evan Yeager, a very, very old man and a pioneering survey pilot who has mapped more of the Outer Rim fringe systems than anyone in generations, despite having lived through three major wars.

The security lockdown only seals turbolifts and outer doors. Safine is too late by whole minutes for Voon. By seconds only for Yeager: they reach the door to his quarters as his head rolls out into the corridor.

Crouched by the entry, she glances at Bastila. Bastila gives her a grim blue glare in response.

The dark Jedi is a hard knot of angry blackness in the Force -

No. There are two of them. The dark Jedi and another, not as dark, but even angrier.

Well, they've been in enough dirty fights to know how this works. Disgust and pain and determination trickles through the bond. Safine waves the Twi'lek back. _I go high_, she says.

Bastila jerks her head. _Go._

Blind entry. Her leap takes her over a humming lightsaber and into the face of -

No reason this male human face should be familiar, except it feels as though it is. Behind her Bastila engages the lesser Dark Jedi in the buzzing clash of sabers. Safine counters a slash, thinking about that sense of familiarity, watches a lip curl -

"You Jedi are too easy to kill," he says, and attacks. "Weak. Pathetic."

Safine lets him drive her back. Bastila - Bastila is easily her opponent's superior, and the only reason _that _fight isn't over yet is because Bastila wants to take him alive.

Safine turns a thrust aside with a flick of the wrist and evaluates. This guy is good. Not good enough to beat her, unless he gets very lucky, but enough that taking him alive - Well. He's good enough that once she goes on the offensive she'll have to put him down fast. "I take it you're another bloody Sith then," she says. She allows her voice to quiver with strain. "Couldn't you have all died out with Malak?"

"Malak was a fool. Shortsighted. My master is as far beyond him as I am beyond you!"

_So you do have a master. Brilliant. How many freaking Sith did the war create?_ "I've _had _it," she snarls, and counterattacks, "up to _here_ with bloody gloating _Sith_."

The Force is a tide. She is the tide and the tide is her. With Force-driven clarity, she sees her opening.

Beat the blade away to the left. Right foot into the gut and _pivot._

Cut diagonally in half, he crumples.

"Who's beyond who now?" she mutters. Bastila's duel is still ongoing. Her Dark Jedi opponent is pale and sweating. Safine moves to block his retreat with a levelled lightsaber.

"Surrender and live," Bastila says to him.

"I'd listen to her," Safine advises.

He looks from one of them to the other, nervous in the glow of the sabers. A muscle jumps in his jaw. He looks younger than Bastila. "I can't," he says, desperate. "I _can't_." Something twists in his face.

_No, dammit!_

But Safine's forward lunge is too late. He's already turned his blade on himself.

Bastila stares at her over his corpse, disbelieving. The air stinks of char and blood. The distant screech of the emergency alarm mars the silence.

"Well," Safine says flatly, and deactivates her lightsaber. "That went rather less well than I'd hoped." 

#

#

Bastila feels ill.

The kolto patch on her injured shoulder itches, the pain a faint irritation. The conference room on the Masters' level has no windows. In addition to her, Dai, and Tia Cormyra, there are six Jedi present: not counting the four Masters of the Jedi Council (who are this moment closeted in the council chamber) and the young students, there are only thirteen Jedi on Coruscant in total, and two of those are living, like Evan Yeager was, in infirm retirement.

A second, smaller hitsquad - this one a man and two droids only - infiltrated the Temple through the maintenance tunnels and attacked Jedi Master Kavar in his rooms. Like Ilo Voon, Kavar is another veteran of the war with the Sith. Unlike Voon, he detected and defeated the assassins who tried to kill him, but as the grim-faced security major - a non-Jedi seconded from the Coruscant Security Force - points out, the Temple can no longer be considered safe.

"It's worse than that," Dai murmurs. She's sitting in the chair beside Bastila, legs drawn up under her, head tilted back against the wall and eyes closed. An observer might think her sleeping, but her warm breath by Bastila's ear gives her attitude the lie.

"How so?" Bastila murmurs back.

"The boy killed himself rather than surrender, Bastila." Dai's voice is very soft. "That's either frighteningly thorough mental conditioning, or - even in our hands - he was afraid of what his masters could do to him. Neither one of those possibilities are good for us." A sigh. "If the Council has any sense, they're in there planning to evac the kids from the Temple and send them into hiding. And if they're smart, they'll get the rest of us off Coruscant as well. A moving target's harder to hit."

Dai has a point, but - "Abandon the Temple?" That hasn't been done since the Hundred-Year Darkness, if ever.

"How many Jedi are left? A hundred? Two hundred? First the wars with Exar Kun, then the Mandalorians - Malachor V was bad enough, but while..." A hesitation. "While _Revan _and Malak were out recruiting Sith, the Order was losing people. To simple attrition, if nothing else. _We Jedi_ are notoriously predictable when it comes to putting our lives on the line to save innocents. And that's not even counting the Jedi who just downed lightsabers and disappeared into any of a thousand backwater worlds, to meditate on the Force until they can reconcile their principles with the reality of life during wartime." Leaning forward, Dai's eyes are open now, direct and intent; her voice getting louder. "And now, less than a month since Malak died, there's a Sith out there organised enough to get at least two hunter-killer teams onto Coruscant and into the Temple. And he or she is picking targets with military value. Voon. Kavar. If we assume the droids weren't just intended as distraction, _you._ I'll lay you any odds you like there was another team that hit Admiralty Centre, and the Republic's down a Fleet Admiral and a general or three."

"A cogent analysis, Jedi Dai."

Bastila starts. The door to the conference room has opened while she was distracted, and the sum total of the Jedi Council present on Coruscant - Masters Vandar, Vrook, Kavar and Helma Ren, a Quarren female whose views are even more conservative than Vrook's - file into the room. It is Ren who speaks, her tentacles twitching with irritation. "Have you anything else to add?"

Dai's mouth hardens. For an instant Bastila fears she'll say something flippant and provocative, and _that_ would be a disaster: Ren had been adamantly opposed to having Revan alive, and her feelings have hardly changed. The last thing they need is for Dai to give her an excuse to bring her suspicions into an open confrontation. But the brief hardness in Safine's face lasts only an instant before it relaxes. "Nah, I think I've said all I need to for now," she says, lightly. Her emotions are opaque in the Force, a tight control that belies her outward ease. "Unless I'm wrong, of course."

Ren's displeasure at Dai's disrespect is clear, but Kavar raises a peaceable hand. "You're not wrong. Admiralty Centre was also targeted this morning, though our present strained relations with the Senate and the Chancellor's office mean we don't know yet how badly they've suffered. In light of Coruscant's apparent vulnerability - our Temple's apparent vulnerability - and the fact that a large faction within the Senate blames _us _for the Sith war, it is the decision of the Council that those least able to defend themselves will be evacuated to a more secure location. I will be escorting the younglings off-planet: anyone who wants to volunteer to assist should report to me by 0800 tomorrow. The rest of you are free to report to Master Vrook for other assignments, to remain here, or to disperse as you see fit."

_They're really going to evacuate the Temple._ "If I didn't know better," Bastila murmurs to Dai, as the Masters deal with a noisy eruption of questions and protest - seven beings, even Jedi, can make quite a ruckus when they're taken by surprise - "I'd suspect you of eavesdropping."

"No need to." Safine shams utter unconcern rather well, but through the bond Bastila senses a thin trickle of _intent_, like the hunting anticipation of some predatory animal. "The enemy's proven they can penetrate our defences. Kavar knows what that means, even if - do you see? - neither Vandar nor Helma are actually happy with his solution." A pause. "Did you find anything in the archives?"

"Not much." Bastila flicks a glance towards the Masters. Dai's right: neither Vandar nor Ren seem particularly satisfied. "I had a little luck. It's a planet, by the way. Unknown Regions. I found a mention of a man who claimed to have come from there, but that's over a hundred years ago, and the source wasn't particularly impressed by his trustworthiness." Mentioning a possible Sith empire in the Unknown Regions can wait for later, she decides. Out of the hearing of Jedi unsettled by Sith assassins.

"The fact that it exists outside my so-reliable memory is something, at least." Dai hesitates. The impromptu question-and-answer session is dying down, and their quiet conversation is starting to draw glances. The quality of the _intent_ leaking through the bond is becoming something determined and bleak. "I need you to have my back, Bastila. If everything goes to hell, you need to find the planet and figure out -"

Master Vandar thumps the floor with his staff, interrupting both Dai and the Bothan currently arguing with Kavar. "Enough!" he snaps. "Jedi we are! Act as Jedi, we will!"

"What he means is stop arguing and _go do something useful._" Vrook glares into the sudden silence. He stabs a finger at Bastila and Dai. "Apart from you two. You stay right here."

"Yes, Master Vrook," Bastila says, and wonders what it is the Council wants them to do this time.

#

#

"Got another impossible job for us?" Safine says mildly, when she and Bastila were alone in the room with the four Council Masters. There is a pressure in the Force, a nudging sense of a vital choice waiting to be made. "Because I have to tell you, once really was enough."

"Not impossible," Kavar says. "We want you to transport the older apprentices and younger Padawans to Bothawui, with instructions for the Jedi on the mediation team there to take them on to a different location. It should be a milk run, but your vessel not only has the space to take them, it has defences as well. And you and Jedi Shan have worked together before."

_I guess I won't be in the Temple very long, will I, Vandar?_ It's almost a relief. And maybe, just maybe, when the apprentices are in safe hands, she can keep going and track down the source of her dread. _Dromund bloody Kaas._

Helma Ren's tentacles twist. "Once again, I disagree with this decision!" she bites out. "Vrook, surely _you _can see that this is foolishness?"

Safine senses suspicion, thwarted anger, and a fear no less potent for being rigidly controlled. The nudge slots into place in a moment of dreadful comprehension, and abruptly - _I wish I didn't _- she knows what she has to do. "What is foolishness, Master Helma?" she says, softly. "Evacuating the apprentices? Or sending them with _me_?"

In the silence, Bastila looks at her as though she's run mad.

"What do you mean?" Vrook's tone is careful, measured.

Safine snorts. "Did you think that Malak wouldn't taunt me? He knew Revan best of all, by all accounts - did you think he wouldn't _recognise_ me?" It takes every centimetre of her iron-hard control to meet those four pairs of eyes without flinching. "I know what I was, Vrook. I've known for weeks. I know what I did, and what you chose to do to me - in complete disregard of the ethics of the Order, not to mention the laws of the Republic."

The silence stretches, strained. Safine counts heartbeats. The complicated equations of truth or dare refine themselves. Her life has revolved around the algebra of trust, _loyalty _laid against _opportunity _mitigated by _benefit_ and _cost. _There are too many unknown variables to be certain of the outcome, but even if her calculation is right, she'll only have _one _chance to do this.

Just one.

"I've got a proposal for you," she says, calm, as Helma Ren's hand closes around her lightsaber and Kavar's dark glance finds Vandar's. It costs her something, to project relaxation, to sham ease when Bastila's agitation vibrates through their bond and the air practically hums with the Masters' suspicion. But it's the cost of doing business, and she meets Vrook's glare evenly. "I'll take the kids to Bothawui. And in return, as soon as you hear from the mediation team they've arrived, you tell the Senate - you tell the _Republic_ - just what exactly you did. To me."

"The Senate," Vrook says, "will want to put you on trial." He raises an eyebrow. "I don't see what you hope to achieve in this."

Vandar's green ears twitch. "Or why agree, we should."

Safine leans back and crosses her legs at the ankle. Her voice is a deliberate drawl. "You made the expedient choice before. The Sith choice, even. And it won you - something. If not the war, then the elimination of Malak and the Star Forge. But let's be honest." She draws in a breath. _Now. _Now is the moment. Now is the fulcrum. "I'm _not _a Jedi hero. I'm not even very much of a Jedi, and presenting me as a hero is a dangerous lie. It doesn't serve the Republic. It doesn't serve the order. And it in no way serves the _victims _of our late war. So trust me now, and let the Republic kill me later. Or don't trust me, and send Bastila in the _Hawk _alone. But by the graves of all the dying stars, can we all stop pretending self-righteous innocence here?" 

#

#

"Are you _mad_?" Bastila hisses later.

Dai is going to throw her life away. It took an hour, but the Masters agreed to Dai's demands and dismissed them to prep the _Hawk_ to receive fourteen adolescent passengers and depart at oh-dark-thirty in the morning. The Republic will try Dai as soon as they learn who she was, and - "A war crimes trial will end with you sentenced to _death_, you realise?"

"What?" Dai swings to face her. The corners of her yellow-green eyes are tight, her face drawn. "You think I'm coming _back?_"

Bastila opens her mouth. Closes it again. "Then why - ?"

"If I'm going to find Dromand Kaas," Dai says, very softly, "I might need Revan's name and reputation. The kind of people who know Sith secrets aren't likely to trust Jedi heroes." A level glance. "If you're coming with me, Bastila, you need to be okay with that."

And Bastila realises that Dai has only told her this because Dai is counting, at some level, on her complicity. Because Dai _trusts _her. And, maybe, knows the secrets of her rebellious heart.

"Of course I'm coming," she says. "You'll need _someone _to keep you out of trouble."

#

#

* * *

_So I'm going to be on holiday for the next couple of months. No updates for a good long while._


	5. Chapter 5

_See previous disclaimers._

_I'm back. Though who knows for how long?_

_Chapter 5, in which we have some more plot, and extra explosions.  
_

* * *

**Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: The Longest Road**

**#**

****  
**Chapter Five**  
****

**#**

That night, before Bastila goes on board, Kavar finds her in her room.

"Jedi Shan," he says from her doorway. He looks worn and tired, a little old. The formality sits uncomfortably on him. "May I come in?"

"Master Kavar." Dai and Malak between them have succeeded in teaching her suspicion. This is no mere farewell visit. He wants something, something he is self-conscious about asking for. It hurts something inside her, but she doesn't let it show. "What do you need?"

"Jedi Shan." He bites his lip. "Bastila. I know we've asked a lot of you. And it must feel like we're asking still more, especially after what Malak did to you. I wish we could give you time to heal."

_Heal?_ How do you fixed what's broken, when you're no longer quite sure if it was ever really whole? Dai was right, that night after Lehon. There's never really any going back. Just going on. Bastila's smile is crooked. "I will be well, Master Kavar. I am still a Jedi."

"I'm glad to hear it." He gives her a glance filled with compassion. "Bastila, we have one thing more to ask of you. The Council is... worried, about Revan. About what this demand of hers might mean. About what it means for her to know. But she listens to you. It's clear that she is -" his mouth quirks, half concerned, half resigned "- _attached_ to you. And your bond is still between you. We need you to keep her with us, Bastila. If she comes unleashed, if she becomes truly _Revan_ once more... You know what it would do to the Republic. To the galaxy."

Bastila stares down at her duffel bag. Two sets of robes. Two sets of civilian clothes. The set of tools Carth gave her before he returned to the fleet, a couple of holocubes, a river pebble from Dantooine, a rough carving of a kinrath pup Mission had made under Zaalbar's tutelage and given her after Kashyyk. She would have few possessions even if the Order did not discourage them. The fact that she has lingered this long over her packing is a self-indulgence, a luxury she is ashamed to have permitted herself. She wants the universe to be simple again. No shades of grey. Right and wrong, Jedi and Sith, good and evil, civilisation and barbarism: it should be something more clearly defined than _us_ and _them._ It should be enough to follow the rules, to nod her head to Kavar and open her heart about Dai's plan. But is what the Order did to Dai any different, in anything other than intention, to what Malak wanted to do to her? The Masters wanted Revan's knowledge and her talents to counter Malak, and in order to acquire them they were willing to destroy _Revan_ herself utterly, remake her into someone new.

Much as Malak had remade her. The old Bastila Shan, the one who believed herself invincible and right, who cleaved to the rules and _believed_, truly and utterly, that the Council would always make the best choices - that Bastila Shan died on the _Leviathan_. She is not sure, yet, who the person who returned from Lehon - angry, bitter, wounded and betrayed - really is. It was Revan who brought her back - Safine Dai, furious and concerned and yes, _attached_ - who refused to leave her side during the week's hyperspace journey back to Coruscant. Who met her flashes of black rage with patience and a boundless, implacable refusal to turn away; it is Revan who held her shoulders when she shook with the horror of her nightmares and her desires. Who met her self-loathing and barbed attempts to drive everyone _away_ with terrible compassion, dreadful understanding. Who refused to let the fact that Bastila had _broken _be a final, defining epitaph.

She still doesn't know what happened to Dai, between that first confrontation with Malak, and the last. Only that at the Star Forge, and after, her eyes had been haunted and hollow. And so very implacable.

_Everybody breaks, Bastila_, she had said. _And everybody is capable of terrible things. You can choose to learn to live with the scars and the consequences. Or you can let the worst things that ever happened to you, and the worst things you've ever done, define who you are. Forever._

Bastila lifts her eyes to Kavar's. "Have you considered," she says, very quietly, "the possibility that Safine Dai has become a restraining influence upon _me_, since Lehon?"

He raises an eyebrow. "Has she?" he asks, soft and serious.

She slings her duffel over one shoulder. "You should consider it," she says, and passes him in the door.

**#**

Text of a holomessage from Jedi Safine Dai to Commodore Carth Onasi, Officer Commanding Task Group 31, Republic Second Fleet, archived by Republic Intelligence Services:

_Carth. You don't owe me any favours, but I'm asking anyway. I have a problem. I remembered some other things. Could be worse than Lehon, and I'm going to do something about it. So I need everything you can coax out of your pals in Republic Intelligence on a smuggler, name of Frell Cade, who ran a ship called _Luck_ out of Sluis Van about a hundred years ago. And everything you have on Sernpidal. I mean everything, flyboy. Anything from solid intel to cantina scuttlebut. It's important._

_I'll be landing in Drev'starn on Bothawui in three days. After that, I'll have to drop out of touch. You're probably going to hear some disturbing things. If Dodonna asks, I have no plans to start conquering the galaxy again. And I will come back. Trust me. Or if you can't trust me, trust Bastila._

_Stay safe, flyboy. But if you can't stay safe, stay lucky.  
_

**#**

They don't do a lot of talking about the future, on the _Hawk._ The kids are bright-eyed and inquisitive, and spend a lot of time asking questions. Their number includes Matt, whose sullen demeanour at being sent to safety by his Master lightens when he realises he is shut in a small ship with a genuine Jedi _hero_. Safine would be sympathetic to Bastila's discomfort at his ill-concealed hero-worship, but it's hard not to be amused. The kid's damned earnest. He actually reminds her a little of Bastila, at the beginning, but without the shell of insecurity masked by arrogance.

And Bastila, at least, can hide from all those open earnest faces in the cockpit, behind the excuse that _someone_ needs to fly the ship. If Safine tries that, either T3 or HK will find a reason to summon her back out. She suspects Bastila of having reprogrammed them on the sly.

After the first night, when Bastila wakes screaming and cursing, they sleep separate shifts, and monitor each other for nightmares.

**#**

"Query: Master, _please_ can I blast the small meatbags? Observation: They are very annoying and shrill."

"I said no the first time, HK." In the cockpit of the _Ebon Hawk_, Safine rolls her eyes. "Ask again, and I'll reprogramme you for pacifism."

"Complaint: You are a hard and cruel master. Statement: I will refrain from asking."

"Good." She glances to Bastila. The other woman's concentration is on the controls: Bastila is the better pilot, but Safine senses a little worry. They're a handful of minutes from hyperspace reversion, on the last leg of the three jumps from Coruscant to Bothawui, and apart from a couple of homesick teenagers, everything's been going well. Maybe too well. "Go make sure everyone's strapped in, and then get yourself to the gun turret, okay? The last report from the shipping news mentioned an uptick in piracy in Bothan space."

"Anticipation: Master, I look forward to the opportunity for terminating pirate meatbags. Disappointed Addendum: Although space combat lacks the satisfaction of real bloodletting."

"Go. And don't blast anyone unless we're being fired on!" she yells after his clanking footsteps.

"Two minutes to realspace reversion," Bastila says, quietly.

"Right." Safine checks her readouts. "So. You going to tell me where the Council stashed the homing beacon?"

"Homing beacon?" Bastila studies the viewport intently. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean."

"Now that..." Safine grins. "That's a lie. And not a good one. You can do better than that. T3'll find it eventually, but I'd rather not hole up on an asteroid for a week while we look."

Bastila snorts. "As if they'd tell me where they put it."

"I wasn't truly certain there was one on board until just now," Safine says mildly.

"Why, you -"

"Manipulative jerk?" Safine suggests. "Hairless Wookiee?"

"Underhanded smuggler," Bastila says disapprovingly. And, suddenly professional: "Reversion."

"We need to work on your insults." The black of space replaces the swirl of hyperspace in the viewport, Bothawui a distant dot in the darkness. On the sensors - "Contact," Safine says, shortly. "Multiple contacts, bearing zero-zero-six by zero-nine-two. Looks like a furball. Snubfighters and four - five capital ships. I don't remember applying to join another damn war."

"That implies we applied to join the first one." Bastila, dryly. "Run or fight?"

"Oh, you mean we didn't? And neither. Work up co-ordinates for a quick jump out of here, but unless they notice us, we're just going to sit here until we figure out what's going on."

"Oh, a marvellous plan. Who put you in charge?"

"My ship, my rules. What's the matter, don't you trust me?" Safine's smile is tight.

"If we didn't have fourteen children on board, I might feel a _little _better about hanging around the edges of a battlezone."

"You might have a point there. But on the other hand, Juhani's down there, with Belaya and the rest of the mediation team, and unless we're planning on hauling our cargo halfway around the galaxy, we need to find out when - if - it'll be safe for us to make contact." She tries the com bands. "Jamming on all civilian frequencies, by the way. And we have two snubbies inbound. What do our shields look like?"

"Solid. At least as long as we aren't in the way of any turbolasers."

"Copy. Turbolasers bad." The snubfighters are Nezzon-3s, unshielded and not hyper-capable, but fast. Standard protocol calls for fifty-four Nezzon-3s to form the screening element of a Sith light battle group: an assault carrier with its complement of fighters and ground attack elements, and two battle frigates. And - yes, two of the capital ships on her sensors are battle frigates. Two more are elderly Republic battleships of pre-Exar Kun wars vintage - probably Bothawui's system defense establishment, and fairly surprising at that: she would've thought a system as lacking in strategic value as Bothawui would be lucky to rate a cruiser for piracy suppression. She glances to Bastila. If all the younger woman's time with the fleet wasn't wasted, she should be coming to the same conclusion. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"That we've stumbled into a Sith raid parsecs away from the front?" Bastila says sharply. "I do have a working brain, Dai."

"That's more the action of a fleet looking to regain their momentum than one that should be falling apart, don't you think?"

"We have more immediate problems, Dai!"

"Don't we always?" The snubbies are starting a strafing run. Safine sighs. "Okay, Bastila. Do your thing."

**#**

Bastila Shan learned to fly on Dantooine. It was Kavar who insisted she learn, the year her battle meditation made itself felt, and the Council let him have his way. She was fourteen that year. He tutored her personally for three months, and then disappeared to deal with one of the continuous crises provoked by the wars with the Mandalorians.

Once assigned to the Fleet, first under the supervision of a Master, and then - more and more frequently as the exigencies of war demanded - alone, she had little opportunity to indulge. And Carth was always the better pilot in their late adventures. But she loves it. It is one thing, one symbol of freedom, that even Malak could not taint for her. Could not touch.

The controls are easy and responsive under her hands. The snubfighters have split up, one two o'clock high, the other spiralling in from three o'clock low: if the _Hawk_ was only the battered freighter it looks like, the standard sweep would be more than adequate to render them into space dust. Bastila stands the _Hawk _on its axis as the first laser shots spatter on the shields and gooses the throttle.

"Firing solution," Dai announces calmly.

"Whenever," Bastila grits, and spins them into an evasive spiral, "you're _ready_."

"HK, weapons free." Space spits green fire, from the forward guns - Dai's hands steady at the co-pilot's board, presence in the Force focussed and predatory - and from the crazy assassin droid in the dorsal gun turret, and suddenly they're flying through debris. "Rookies," Dai says, almost regretfully. "Looks like we're in the clear."

Bastila glances at the plot. The furball is breaking up, the Sith frigates retreating from Bothawui's mass shadow behind their screen of snubfighters, and as she watches, one, two, three - all three of the Sith capital ships wink out, their icons blinking briefly orange on the sensors to show they've jumped to hyperspace. There are a dozen Nezzon-3s left - and then their icons converge on one of the limping Bothawui cruisers. Cruiser and snubbies disappear in an explosion so bright it's visible as a miniature nova through the viewport.

_"Damn._" Dai sucks air through her teeth. "Just... damn."

Three thousand two hundred sentients. That's the establishment complement on a battlecruiser of that vintage. Three thousand two hundred lives, extinguished. Bastila exhales shakily. She is tired of war. Sick to death of it.

But war's not done with her.


	6. Chapter 6

_What do you mean, it's December already?_

_...That took a lot longer than I expected._

* * *

**Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: The Longest Road**

**#**

**Chapter Six**

**#**

Reunions are messy.

They've barely touched down on one of Drev'starn's landing pads - and the port is like an overturned hive, buzzing with fear and uncertainty - before someone's banging on the hatch. Juhani slides gracefully through the airlock before the inner door's fully open, her feral elegance marred by bared canines and a smear of blood on the shoulder of her robe. "Sith," she snarls. The word's a curse. "Will we _never _be rid of them?"

"One day, my friend." Safine steps into her fierce embrace, and does not ask about the blood. "If we're lucky." Juhani's warm bristling fur smells of cardamom, ionised air, and dust. The Cathar is tense, furious - but still in control. She pulls back to look the other Jedi up and down with concern. "Juhani? You're well? Belaya?"

Juhani's hackles settle. Safine hides a smile. The Cathar's affections are plain, and she can't say she doesn't approve. Belaya might be a bit of a stickler, but in this one thing, they're both equally willing to stand outside the Code. "She waits. She pilots our transport. We will depart as soon as the children are on board. We should all be safe when we -"

"Don't tell me where you're going," Safine says, sharply, and winces at Juhani's hurt glance. "Sorry. But the less I know..."

"It has become that bad?"

"That bad. And -" Her first impulse is to impart a confidence. She trusts Juhani. Maybe a little too much for either of their safeties. She masters herself while the Cathar's gold eyes watch her patiently. "And I'm not going to stay away from trouble. You know me. I attract it. It's better all around for me not to know."

_And for you._

Juhani makes a soft feline noise in her throat. "If you get yourself killed, Revan, I will not forgive you."

"Noted," Safine says, and tries to keep the rueful irony from her tone. Juhani might be one of the only people in the galaxy who will actually mourn her, in either of her incarnations, rather than breathing a large sigh of relief.

"Juhani!" Bastila rounds the corner from the axial corridor, face flushed, normally immaculate robes slightly dishevelled. Safine bites down on her grin. The kids are capable of putting anyone in disarray. She embraces the Cathar, and Safine doesn't need their bond to sense the fierce confused swirl of her emotions. But she says only, quietly, "I wish we had more time, Juhani. Is the entire mediation team going with you?"

"I and Belaya, only." A Cathar's smile is always too toothy for comfort, but Juhani's is a little subdued, uncomfortable. "The two others are Camaasi, and not Jedi. They decided they would stay."

Bastila's lips quirk, halfway between a grimace and sympathy. "Ah. It is unfortunate, but the Order has no choice but to protect our most vulnerable members. We must hope this turns out well for everyone."

"We must," Juhani agrees, but her nostrils flare.

Safine tilts her head. "Bastila... You didn't leave the kids under _HK_'s supervision, did you?"

"You think I'd allow that homicidal menace to supervise _anything?_" Bastila asks, wryly. "They're ready to go. Your insane droid is merely preventing their entry to the cockpit."

"You remember," Safine says to Juhani, crooked and light, "back when we thought gizka were trouble? Yeah. Apparently gizka are nothing compared to the trouble a dozen bored Jedi teenagers in a small ship can get into. I'm sorry to be the one to do this to you, but let's get you introduced to your new crew, shall we? And may the Force be with you. You and Belaya are going to need it."

**#**

**##**

**#  
**

"I need a drink," Dai says, after Juhani departs, herding the children - solemn now, as they haven't been before - in front of her. Belaya's craft is across the landing field: a stern Bothan officer in security uniform watches from the gates of the port building, a Camaasi in the robes of a diplomat standing sombrely at his side. "And we need supplies. How do you feel about hitting the town?"

The metal of the loading ramp chills Bastila's fingers. A cold wind is blowing, and Drev'starn smells of ice and dust and tension. "Are you sure?" she says, quietly, knowing Safine will hear the question on more than one level. Juhani's departure has shaken her composure.

When the children were aboard, Bastila could pretend that she did not feel her vulnerability. Could pretend - to Safine, to herself - that she retreated to the cockpit because their hero-worship made her uncomfortable, and not because she wrestled with raw fear and its consequent anger. Because if she knows anything, she knows Dai will not change her mind in the face of a task she sees as necessary, as her responsibility.

But now they're gone, and Juhani with them, and Bastila can no longer avoid the fact that she will follow Dai into disobedience. Kavar asked too much: she cannot betray Dai's trust and still believe herself worthy of being a Jedi, even if it may be seen as all but treason in the Masters' eyes. Dai's nightmares have been worse than her own, filled with a looming blackness, a vile despairing fury she remembers all too well from the Leviathan. But the thing that haunts Dai's dreams is worse than Korriban, worse than Malak, worse even than the Star Forge over Lehon. It makes the swirl of dark side energy that surrounded Revan seem tame.

Revan, at least, had leashed her power to reason. It might have been terrible reason, but Bastila had been able to see at least the outlines of the dire, cold logic that had governed the Sith Lord's actions after her return from the Mandalorian Wars. The clouded darkness that Bastila has seen through their bond in Dai's dreams makes the very idea of reason seem a mockery.

Dai has said little, but Bastila's seen the grimness that creeps through her wry facade, now and then: more than memory shadowing those tired yellow-green eyes.

Dai drags a weary hand through her hair. The twist to her lips is crooked, pained. "Yeah. I'm sure."

"I assume you have some kind of plan." Bastila's tone is drier than she intended. If Safine has any designs beyond find problem: fix problem, she's yet to share them.

"Hah." Dai snorts. "I don't know what you learned when the Council threw you into the Fleet, my friend, but I'm reliably informed that many people believe trustworthy intelligence is generally a prerequisite for making plans. Not that any plan ever survives contact with the enemy, but right now we have exactly one name. Maybe two, if that Sluissi smuggler you found in the Archives left any tracks."

By now Bastila is familiar with how Safine's mind works. The ghost of amusement in the other woman's voice is enough to tell her that Dai knows - or at any rate is guessing - more than she feels comfortable saying. In the beginning, she mistook Dai's caution for arrogance, self-mocking humour for derision. Now, she can see the wry deflection for the defence it is. So she says, lightly, "In the absence of reliable intelligence, or so I have been told, occasionally intelligent people go looking for some."

"That's where the drink comes in." Dai's grin might be crooked, but it's real. "Or are you telling me in a port full of pilots, we can't find a smugglers' bar?"

**#**

**##**

**#  
**

Bastila's worn civvies before. Jedi attract trouble, and she's not fool enough - not, at least, anymore - to want to court it if it can be avoided. But it never feels natural.

It doesn't look natural on her, either. Not, at least, the way it does on Dai. Safine can change her persona as easily as her clothes: when she straps on a battered Echani armour vest over her white undress shirt and hangs a pair of blasters from her belt in place of her lightsabers, she might be a slightly down-at-heel mercenary as easily as a jobbing pilot.

Bastila regards the fastenings of her own armoured vest with enormous distaste. The Republic markings have been painted over, red and grey replaced by unrelieved black, lightened only by a blue and yellow smuggler's flash on the shoulder. With a vibroblade and a blaster at her hip and her lightsaber concealed in a special holster in her right boot, she feels shady, as though mere imposture of the sort of sordid character a Jedi should arrest is enough to effect a transformation.

And wearing black puts her too much in mind of the Sith, which is no help to her humour.

"Here." Dai leans in from behind her, touches the seals of the armour's flank panels. The pressure of her fingers is gentle. "These are awkward. Let me give you a hand?"

"It's all right. I can do them." Bastila knows her rueful smile is thinner than she might prefer. "It is merely that I feel foolish in disguise."

"If you want to stay on the ship..." A tangible hesitation.

"It's all right." Bastila shakes her head. They both know that this is merely the first step, and she will have to accustom herself to not presenting herself as a Jedi, to not living as a Jedi, or their tentative investigations will rapidly run aground. She tugs her sleeves down, covering the scars on her wrists, and covers her discomfit with an impatient glance at Dai. "Shall we go?"

**#**

**##**

**#  
**

It's a lot more hassle for a pair of Jedi disguised as mercenaries to pass customs at Drev'starn port than it is for a pair of Jedi, Bastila notices. A Bothan security officer checks their - false - identities and permits in a tiny, chilly, white-walled room. The corridor outside is full of passing clamour, and distant, tinny comm announcements vibrate the thin internal walls. The air smells faintly of must and nerves.

"Ebon Hawk?" he says at length. He looks from Dai to Bastila, and his pale red fur ripples slightly.

"That's right." Dai leans back, casual, but Bastila can feel the tension in her. "Problem?"

He snorts. "None of ours. We had a message come in for your ship, is all. Wait one." He mutters into his com, and a moment later, a much more junior officer appears in the doorway with a datapad. "Here. What kind of courier gets priority messages from a Republic Fleet Command?"

"The kind who take their jobs where they can find them," Dai says, thin-lipped. "May we go?"

He shrugs. "Go ahead."

**#**

Text of a datamessage from Commodore Carth Onasi, Officer Commanding Task Group 31, Republic Second Fleet, to Spaceport Control Drev'starn Bothawui, archived by Republic Intelligence Services:

_PRIORITY RED  
FOR ATTENTION CARGO FREIGHTER EBON HAWK  
PRIORITY RED_

_[Encryption commences]  
Dai. It sounds like you're heading for rancor territory. I can get my hands on some intel, but I won't risk sending it out as a holomessage. Remember the station in the Yavin system? Be there within seven days. I'll send someone to meet you in person._

_I'd come myself, but the Sith are regrouping fast, and I can't leave my people._

_May the Force be with you.  
[Encryption ends]_

**#**

"Across the lines?" The bartender looks at Safine with black suspicion. "Didn't you just come into port running cargo for the damn Republic Fleet?"

Safine sips the - truly terrible - expensive ale, gives a half-shrug. "Got friends on both sides of the mess, mate. And I can pay for news. Who's buying, who's selling, who's calling the shots." Just a tiny nudge with the Force, nothing intrusive, a little protective colouring to take the edge off his distrust, projecting close-mouthed competence and _I'm like you, just trying to make my way in the cold hard galaxy, who cares who's in charge?_

Behind her, Bastila leans against a wall, watchful, bored, and not entirely at ease. Three increasingly bad bars have worn down the sharp edges of her discomfort, but this makes the fourth time Safine's done this very same dance with little result except a foul taste on her tongue, and Safine's starting to get a bit tired of it herself.

The 'tender scowls, and thumps the astromech droid doubling as a server. "Work faster, you rustbucket!" He lowers his voice. "Same as always. The Hutts have a lock on merchandise. Them and the Exchange, but at least the Hutts probably won't sell your ass on the open market until _after _you've done the job they hired you for. They're doing fierce trade in hulls and mercs: rumour has it there's a couple of new baby Sith Lords running around with fleet groups, but only _one_ of 'em is sitting on the shipyards at Sernpidal. Another Darth something-or-other. Abadon, that was it. For my money, he's the one behind that vapeshow overhead: the noise out of Nar Shaddaa says he has a fleet captain trained up by Revan herself, one who survived Malak by being in repair dock at the time the Republic was showing him the inside of his own guts. And between them, they have brains enough to get things organised and keep the pressure on."

This is more news - and worse - than she has expected to hear. Behind her Bastila has gone alert like a hunting kinrath, tense and wary. "How do you know this?"

He taps his nose. "I got friends too. You want to get merchandise, you go to Nar Shaddaa or Nal Hutta. And stay away from the mess in the Corporate Sector. Ain't nothing good in there."

Safine nods her thanks, slides a credit chip across the bar, and leaves her drink beside it.

Bad news always costs more than you'd prefer.

**#**

* * *

_Until next time, however long that may be._


	7. Chapter 7

_In which we introduce Padawan Matt Vekil, who is too young for his own good._

_

* * *

_

**Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: The Longest Road**

**#**

**Chapter Seven**

**#**

The smuggling compartment's narrow and dark. Cramped on his belly, Matt Vekil digs his toes against the metal, flexes his calves, and shivers. Every breath compresses his ribs against the deckplates.

_Maybe this wasn't such a good idea._

Sneaking back aboard the _Hawk_ had been almost too easy, though. Amel'd promised to cover for him, like always, and in the rush to board the other ship, he slipped off behind a landing marker - he's always been good at hiding, and since Master Vandar took him on as Padawan, he's learned how to hide his presence in the Force, too - and clambered back in through the astromech maintenance hatch. He didn't even need to slice the codes to open it: he already had them, from helping T3 solder a misbehaving fuel line the first day out of Coruscant

He's been here for _ages._ In a light trance, until the vibrating rumble of the engines disturbed his focus and brought him back to dry-mouthed, cold, dark reality.

_Master Vandar didn't ought to send me away. _But he's going to _show_ his master. He's going to _prove_ he can be useful. Jedi Dai's blue-skinned crazy Twi'lek friend isn't any older than he is - she's not even a Jedi! - and _she_ was fighting Sith while he was stuck in the Temple. And now he's getting sent away, as though he's some kind of baby, not a Padawan of the Jedi Order!

He might be young, but he's not stupid. He's seen the looks Jedi Dai and Jedi Shan have been exchanging. The Council wouldn't send two war heroes just to escort a bunch of Padawans off-planet, would they? There _has _to be something more happening. He can help. He knows he can.

He's not _quite _certain how, yet, but he knows he can.

"Bastila Shan didn't get sent to safety when _she _was a Padawan," he mutters, resentfully. An uneasy voice at the back of his mind points out that perhaps their two cases are not _quite_ identical. He ignores it. And by the time they find him, anyway, it'll be too late to send him back to the kids.

The engines' timbre changes. He can feel/hear the hyperdrive kick in. _We've jumped. _Triumph wars with apprehension in his gut._ Now they can't send me back._

Best to wait a while before testing that, though.

It takes a while, but eventually, out of sheer boredom, he falls asleep.

Voices wake him. T3's _wheedle-eedle-OOP-beep_, and Jedi Dai's "What do you mean, there's something wrong with the smuggling compartment? Has HK been sneaking extra ordnance on board? By the dark gods of Dan, if that blasted droid tried to bring a surface-to-air missile launcher _again_, I swear I'll reprogram him as a drinks dispenser."

_Doowhit-doowheeet-oot. _Getting closer.

"What do you mean, not HK?" Jedi Dai is close enough that Matt can hear the frown in her voice. He draws himself into as tight a ball as he can manage, concentrates on thinking _I'm not here, nothing here, you can't see me 'cause I'm not here -_

The cover slides off the compartment with a grating noise. For a moment, silence. Matt squeezes his eyes shut. _Notherenotherenothere -_

Then Dai says, in a voice more frozen than the depths of space: "Come out of there, blast you, before I stun you and haul you out by the ears."

**#**

**##**

**#  
**

"And _stay _there," Safine says, grimly, when she's steered Vandar's Padawan to a seat at the messroom table and pushed him into it. Matt's watching her with nervous, determined eyes. Give the boy credit for guts, if nothing else: the first thing out of his mouth was _I'm not going back._

This could be a problem.

The hollow clang of boots on metal decking heralds Bastila's arrival from the cockpit. Safine tilts her head to Matt. Lightly: "Look what I found. Think we should keep him?"

She's not smiling. There's something cold and terrible moving inside her. She has a job to do, and the kid has just made it that much harder.

_Not to mention Juhani will be _pissed _when she finds out what he's done._

A chill, familiar calculation shows her ways in which the kid might be put to use. For a moment, it feels as though she's seeing through two pairs of eyes, angles and outcomes overlaid on a dejarik board of choices.

One cannot function as a general without a full share of ruthlessness.

_Down, Revan._

"_Sithspawn_." Bastila's blue glance cuts from Matt to Safine and back, sharp with comprehension. "He stowed away?"

"In the aft smuggling compartment. If T3 hadn't noticed something wrong, he'd probably still be there." Safine rubs the bridge of her nose, tiredly, glad that HK is still in the cargo hold tending to his weapons and not here to tempt her by saying, _Exclamation: Master, a stowaway? Request: Please let me terminate the stowaway meatbag, Master._ "Question is, what do we do with him now?"

"You aren't seriously suggesting he should come with us?"

Matt's jaw juts stubbornly. "I'm a Jedi too, not a child! Whatever you're doing, I can help!" His fists are tight, pale-knuckled. More quietly: "I _want _to help. Please."

Bastila raises a disapproving eyebrow. Safine shrugs. "Were you any older?"

The younger woman's mouth tightens. "That was different. The Council had no choice -" She bites her lip on the sentence, and uncertainty fills the bond between them.

_The Council has had '_no choice'_ about a lot of things._ Safine meets her gaze, levelly. _He's not much younger than Mission. And every instinct I have is telling me it would be a very bad mistake to turn around now. _Aloud, she says, "Our decisions will be better informed after the rendezvous. It's too late to deliver him to Juhani, and we have no time to take him to Coruscant, but perhaps" - with a twist of her lips - "we can deliver him to Carth." A glare at Matt when he starts to open his mouth. "You're in enough trouble without arguing, kid. So _don't_."

"That would appear to be the best course of action," Bastila admits after a moment, consideringly. "At least, I don't have a better suggestion."

Safine grins without much humour. "Then I'll let you explain to him exactly how badly he's screwed up, will I? I seem to recall you used to have a knack for lecturing hasty, impetuous Padawans."

"_One _hasty, impetuous Padawan, at least." Bastila's faint smile is shadowed with irony. Among other things.

**#**

**##**

**#**

Pride is one of the flaws that Jedi fall prey to. Pride, and its cousin, _arrogance_. It took Malak to strip Bastila of Jedi pride. Thoroughly, and without gentleness.

No less thoroughly, though with very different methods, Safine Dai Revan has been stripping her of the arrogance of power. Day by day, since the hour they met, abrading Bastila's cool certainties with sandpaper humour and a fierce crooked gentleness.

She hasn't looked at the galaxy with quite the same eyes, since Lehon. She sees how things can _break_, now. Break, and be broken, and never made really whole again.

This is, she suspects, how Dai - how _Revan_ - has seen things all along.

And _that_ is a thoroughly disturbing thought.

But the boy's pride is kin to hers. Hunched over at the messroom table, fingers twisted uneasily together on the dull metal, not meeting her eyes, he's still convinced he's _right._

_Be fair. In his place_ -

Given the opportunity, she would have very likely done the exact same thing. The fact that, being one of the Republic's secret weapons, she had not _had _the opportunity is rather moot.

It does not make Matt's choice any less irresponsible.

"You will have, by now, caused Juhani and Belaya no little distress," she says, very quietly. "They will not know for certain what has become of you, nor will they be able to find out for quite some time. If we encounter serious trouble, they may never discover what has become of you, because we might all be dead. Or worse, alive in Sith hands." Which is not a thought she can countenance without tasting bile in her throat, but her voice doesn't waver. "Dai and I are able to defend ourselves. We may not be able to defend you as well."

He flashes a dark look at her, and bristles. "I can defend myself!"

"You've never had anyone really trying to kill you." She runs a tired hand through her hair. "Consider what I'm saying, Padawan. Don't let your emotions deceive you."

"Yes, Jedi Shan," he says, sullen.

Well, she's _tried_. Dai can't complain that she hasn't_._ Bastila exhales, softens her glare. "I understand wanting to help, Matt. But consider the consequences. For us, as well as for you."

**#**

**##**

**#**

He's on the ship.

Matt thinks he should maybe feel happier about that, but when Jedi Dai looks at him, her yellow gaze makes him feel disturbingly like a specimen under a microscope, weighed, measured and classified to within a micrometre of his life. Jedi Shan is hardly any better - every time he tries to ask her about the war, about fighting Malak and the Sith, her mouth twists oddly and her eyes go hard and distant.

The protocol droid creeps him out. It kept muttering about _terminating the small meatbag_ until Jedi Dai told it in no uncertain terms to shut its vocabulator, and its ocular sensors _wink _at him whenever he comes in range.

He scowls, scuffing a toe along the deckplates. It's been two days, and they haven't told him anything, not even where they're headed. Jedi Shan assigned him a strict schedule of chores and meditation to keep him out of the way, and the low-voiced conversations between her and Jedi Dai come to a halt every time he passes by. And Dai goes out of her way to avoid him.

The chores are mostly helping T3 with dull routine maintenance, nothing the droid couldn't have easily done on his own, and the meditation - he casts a guilty glance at Bastila, stretched out in restless sleep on the messroom's fold-out couch, which, narrow as it is, she apparently prefers to the bunks in the crew dorm - is deadly boring.

_Deadly _boring, and Matt can't even wander off and hide, because either T3 or the crazy protocol will find him and fetch him back. Or Safine Dai will return from whatever she's doing in the cargo bay and notice he's not doing what he's supposed to.

Which is why he's sitting cross-legged in the messroom, with a datapad holonovel hidden in his lap, _pretending _to meditate.

This isn't turning out to be the adventure he'd hoped for.

Nervous tension twists in his gut. He sighs and reads the same paragraph for the third time, trying to ignore the creeping sensation of disaster: he's got no real reason to be afraid, blast it -

Bastila twitches in her sleep, and whimpers, and the sense of dread intensifies.

He stares at her in sudden realisation. _It's not my fear I'm feeling, it's _hers_._

The hurried hammer of Dai's boots on the deckplates comes from the corridor at a run. "Bastila. _Bastila!_"

**#**

**##**

**#**

Bastila's chest is burning. She can't breathe. She can't remember the last time she took an easy breath, here in this bare ice-cold chamber in the _Leviathan's _belly. The weight of her body suspended from her pinioned arms has been compressing her ribs for days - or maybe for hours, or only minutes. The grey fuzz of the neural disruptor and the constant unrelieved pain has destroyed her sense of time. She's lost track of how many times _he's_ come, flanked by men with avid faces, with blue writhing lightning that obliterates the last vestiges of clear thought in bursts of white-hot uncontrollable agony; with the quiet insistent words that almost, _almost _make sense.

Her own charred skin smells like a battlefield.

_There is no passion, there is serenity. There is no death, there is the Force._

Those words meant something, once. But since then she's screamed her voice hoarse and raw _begging_ for death. Cold black depths of rage and despair have swallowed her whole, and there's no way out.

She can't remember a reality before the pain.

_He's_ coming again, and the knife of furious fear twists in her throat -

**#**

**##**

**#**

Safine knows within seconds of rounding the hatch to the messroom that the nightmare is a bad one, maybe one of the worst since the first nights after the Star Forge. Bastila's pain and terror burns in her gut like bile.

A burst of Force lightning takes her in the shoulder as she rounds the hatch. The impact spins her sideways and knocks the breath from her, but Echani armour dissipates the charge and she stumbles forward -

Her bodyweight's enough to pin Bastila to the couch until her thrashing stops and the wild horrified incomprehension in her eyes fades to recognition. She's projecting reassurance through their bond as hard as she can, fighting to keep from being pulled into the terrified maelstrom of Bastila's nightmare, saying she doesn't know what -_ Malak's dead, he's dead, Bastila you're safe -_

It is a long moment before Bastila goes limp and unresisting in Safine's grasp, breathing hard. Sweat stands out on her forehead. "Damn you." Her tone is low and savage, but her blue eyes are bleak, resigned - and clearly aware. She exhales heavily, and turns her head away into the couch. "_Damn _you, Revan."

"_That _happened long ago, I think." Safine slumps against Bastila's shoulder, one knee braced on the deck. Her nose is bleeding where the other woman's elbow struck it in her thrashing: she wipes it, noticing with some irritation that her hand is shaking with reaction. This is not the first time the other woman has lashed out from a nightmare, but this was a bad one, and Safine can still smell the stink of fear on her clothes. She braces herself on her elbow, regards Bastila's profile. Razor-edged guilt twists in her chest, and the old ache of betrayal. _I did this. Malak was my apprentice. _I _did this. _She clears her throat. "Are you back with us?"

No use asking _Are you all right?_ There's no such thing as _right_, when it comes to this.

"Damn you, Revan." No heat in the words now, only resignation. Bastila's lips go crooked, her glance half-bitter, half-wry. "Get off me, you blasted useless Sith. Your armour is _pinching_."

"Your insults are improving." Dryly, sprawling on her back on the deckplates: "I _knew _you had it in you."

Above her, Bastila's laugh is choked and half-hysterical but _genuine,_ and some part of Safine unclenches at the sound.

_She's strong. She'll come through._

She has forgotten Matt.

White-faced, horrified, staring at them both with one of Safine's own lightsabers in his hand.

* * *

_I'm not quite sure what I'm doing here, so feel free to chime in._

_It might be a while before I get back to this, since I've just about run out of excuses to avoid real life.  
_


	8. Chapter 8

**Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: The Longest Road**

**#**

**Chapter Eight**

**#**

"_Revan_?"

Matt's voice breaks on the word. His dark features are pallid near to whiteness. The lightsaber - it must, Bastila thinks distantly, the thin sourness of bile tainting her throat, have fallen from Dai's belt in their brief struggle - wavers in his grasp. Denial wars with agonised recognition of betrayal in his eyes. She knows that feeling, this moment, _now_. It's the moment she relives in her dreams, the nightmare of lightning in Malak's hand; Revan's knowing yellow eyes; the blank suspicion in Master Vrook's stare when she makes her report after planetfall on Coruscant.

The understanding that nothing will ever be the same.

Dai lies flat on the deckplates, quiet and still as a dead thing. Her eyes are closed, and were it not for the rise and fall of her chest and the trickle of _resignation_ through the bond, Bastila would worry for her.

She has more immediate worries.

"You called her Revan," Matt says, holding her gaze with a desperate intensity. "You called her a _Sith_. Why?"

Bastila can't hide her wince. The only time her control has slipped far enough to forget where she is, and he _has _to be _right there_. She's still ragged-edged from the nightmare, her composure in threads: even if it wasn't, there's no easy answer, no way to make this right. She won't lie to him. She has had enough of lying to protect the Council's dirty little secrets. She has had enough of being _obedient._

There is more to being Jedi than hierarchy and detachment.

She sits up, stiff and cautious. The lightsaber wavers in Matt's hand, a dull familiar hum. She knows why Dai is lying so very still: even the furious might hesitate before attacking a supine opponent, one who is very careful to not so much as make a twitch of threat, and Matt has been long trained out of fury. Good tactics, the sort to be expected of the best general in a generation - except that means _she _has to do the talking, and her mouth is dry, tongue sticky with uncertainty. She swallows. "Safine... was a Fallen Jedi, Matt."

_Was? Is?_ There is no simple, single phrase to describe the tangle of complications in what Revan made herself into, what the Council on Dantooine made of _Darth _Revan, what Safine Dai has remade of what self she has - claimed? Regained? _Built_?

_Built,_ the bond suggests, a concept less a word than an impression of images, lightly flavoured with dry humour. Bastila holds Matt's stare, resists the urge to glance to Dai.

"You called her _Revan_," Matt says again, not flinching. Not lowering the lightsaber.

"The kid should have the truth." Dai, quiet, lifting her head just enough to look Matt in the face. The quirk of her lips is crooked, rueful. "I'm going to sit up now, Matt," she says, her tone all gentle steadiness. "Is that all right with you?"

_Good._ As long as Matt thinks he's in charge, he won't do anything... precipitate.

One of them has to talk him down. And Safine has always been the more persuasive speaker.

"Is that all right?" Safine repeats, soft and steady, when Matt just stares at her.

The question seems to baffle him. After a moment, his slender shoulders twitch in a shrug. "Sure, I guess. Why're you asking?"

"You're holding a lightsaber, Matt," Bastila says, gently, while Dai draws herself up to sit cross-legged. "That's why."

"Oh." He licks his lips, and his glance flickers, but he still makes no move to lower the weapon. "Why'd you call her Revan?"

"Because that's who I used to be, kid," Safine says. She rests her elbows on her knees, directs her glance down and away. Body-language: after this time, Bastila has learned that Safine is almost _always_ deliberate in her cues. Ceding the high ground, moral and physical, is as much a tactic as the infuriating calm with which she approaches argument, the wry humour with which she turns aside insults and anger. "A long time ago, it seems like. The Council did their best to make sure I wouldn't remember, but I do, a little. Bits and pieces."

"The _Council_?"

"They didn't think they had a choice, kid," Safine says, gently. "People will do a lot of things when they don't think they have a better choice. I know," with unfeigned regret, "I did."

"I don't understand." He shuts off the lightsaber, turns it over in his hands. Bastila allows herself a breath of relief. Only a breath: his eyes find hers, desperate and unhappy and betrayed. "I thought Revan was dead. I thought you killed her. I thought -" A ragged inhalation, choked off to silence.

"It's complicated. I..." Even on the bridge of Revan's flagship, even then, when Bastila had the opportunity to chose between saving Darth Revan and letting her die, it had been complicated. Everything that followed had come from that choice. _Jedi act to preserve life, not to destroy it. _"I cannot argue with the Council's choices, at this remove," she says. "The past is done. I may curse Safine, but she is not what she was." _No more am I._

A broken Jedi, wracked by bad dreams.

Safine snorts. "There are enough crimes to lay at my feet anyway. If you mean to make yourself my executioner, Matt, then do it and have done. Take your..." A weighted pause. Rueful resignation seeps through the bond. "Take your vengeance, and call it justice. If I'm dead at least that will make an end to it."

"That's _enough, _Dai," Bastila says, sharp, as Matt's face whitens. A kip-up takes her to her feet, and she extends her hand, drawing every ounce of authority she possesses around her. "Give me the 'saber, Matt. Jedi act to preserve life, not to destroy it. We have a job to do before Safine can face the Republic's justice. And I will _not_ have her die at your hand."

It feels as though she speaks with someone else's voice, to be this _certain _again. Malak burned away so much of her confidence, it's a relief to find herself able to stand, able to put force into her words and find them not brittle, even with the memory of the nightmare riding the back of her tongue like bile. There is one sure thing left in the world after all: she will do her duty, although the Council might disagree with her about what that duty is.

And if she can help it, she will not let Dai die.

Matt gives the lightsaber into her hand with a sullen look, and Bastila swallows her relief.

Then the hyper-reversion alarm sounds.

#

Matt trails the two Jedi into the _Ebon Hawk_'s cockpit. Two Jedi. His throat tightens on the ache of betrayal. Safine Dai is _Revan_. _Darth _Revan.

And Bastila Shan defends her.

His tongue tastes of bile, but he's past the first rush of unthinking fear. Past the first rush of _anger_, that guilty temptation to take the lightsaber and make a clean cut. Safine Dai and Bastila Shan _saved _the Republic. If Dai - if _Revan_ - was still Sith, the Council wouldn't let her out of their sight. They wouldn't let _Bastila _travel with her. Not the great hope of the Republic, when her Battle Meditation could be turned to the Dark Side.

Reluctantly, resentfully, he exhales. Lets go anger, breathes in calm.

Bastila drops into the pilot's chair with a smooth economy of motion, hands already reaching for the controls. "Reversion in sixty. Matt, sit down and strap in. Dai?"

"On it." Beside her, Dai - _Revan, _Matt thinks again, with that same shock of incredulity - toggles the all-ship com. "HK to the gun turret, stand by for lightspeed reversion. T3 to the engines, stand by." A touch on the board. "Shield generators green. Weapons green. How do we look?"

"Clean and green across the board. Matt." Bastila doesn't turn, attention still on her controls. "I said _strap in._"

Heat floods his face. He flings himself into the jumpseat and fumbles with the harness.

"Reversion in ten from my mark." Bastila, coolly professional. "Mark."

Revan's grin is a sideways thing. "Let's hope we don't drop out in the middle of another firefight."

"Don't even _think_ it - Reversion."

The static of hyperspace resolves into an empty starfield.


End file.
